Outgoing Chief Orissa Information Commissioner Mr.D.N.Padhi: A Great Swindler of Funds, Functions and Functionaries
The author of this message is well aware that Mr. D.N.Padhi the outgoing Chief Orissa Information Commissioner has in his official capacity sued him and a co-activist in a civil court for damages and permanent injunction valued Rs. one lakh for allegedly 'defaming and derogating him', using 'scandalous and intimidating language against him', 'degrading his image and social status in public estimation', 'painting a sorry figure of him', 'tarnishing his prestige and reputation', and 'slandering his social position'- all this done out of 'oblique, vicious, malafide and malicious motives' and 'sadistic pleasure'- leading to exhaustion of his 'personal power of tolerance', 'creation of panic' and above all his 'life becoming insecure'. Needless to reiterate here that in my well-considered response, the Hon'ble Court was informed that I have merely called 'spade a spade and rose a rose' and that is what the mantra of justice 'Satyamev Jayate' stands for, and also that is what we shall ever in duty bound adhere to in days ahead, come what may.
2) As for the caption to this message, no cuter an expression than the one chosen, could be traced out from the author's stock of vocabulary. However, it goes without saying, the burden of proof lies solely on this author as to why the chosen caption seemed to be also the choicest one.
3) A swindler is he who loots to his fill and also gets away with impunity, all in a broad daylight, thanks to his superb chicanery. And that is exactly what Mr. D.N.Padhi abusing his office and authority has done to RTI Act, Orissa Information Commission and State exchequer. Public memory being proverbially short, it is necessary to refresh the readership with flashback of a few, vainglorious milestones that dotted his topsy-turvy tenure of long five years. It all started with a big bang. In place of making suo motu disclosures on Commission as a Public authority as mandated under Section-4 of the Act, the first thing he did on assuming the office was to stuff the 'Photo Gallery' of the Commission with big, big glossy photographs of himself and his wife, turning it virtually into his family album. Only after a stream of harsh and constant criticism flowed relentless in the media for over a year, did he realize the nuisance and stop displaying the same. However, it would ever remain a grim reminder that he could keep on eroticizing a public space with impunity, for so length of a time, simply driven by his Narcissistic orgy.
4) In this initial phase too, Mr. Padhi launched his dirtiest game-plan so as to stamp out the nascent offshoots of RTI Act from the soil of Orissa altogether and as well to hijack and appropriate huge amounts of money from the State exchequer to his custody in the name of awareness and training, and all this in brazen violation of Section 26 of RTI Act. Even knowing pretty well that the said Section vested all the functions relating to awareness and training, not on an adjudicatory body like the Commission but on the State Government, the ever smart Mr. Padhi didn't have any qualms of conscience in shamelessly misappropriating and usurping the jurisdiction of the Government along with the huge funds earmarked for the purpose to himself. Simply because, he found the prospects of embezzling public money more alluring and viable in an open-ended setting of eye-dazzling awareness and training programmes than in dry and dreary indoor exercises around adjudication and report-writing, his legitimate domain. As for the inevitable fall-out of this notorious master-stroke by Mr. Padhi in successfully orchestrating the horrendous jurisdictional anomaly of the above kind, he became day by day more and more Lale Lal, while the State Government, brief-less and pie-less, stayed pitifully moron with hands and feet folded all through. And that is precisely the ruling RTI scenario stalking Orissa all these years, singularly thanks to Mr.Padhi's cranky craze for glare and graft.
5) What did Mr.Padhi do with the funds so shrewdly siphoned off by him from the State exchequer on the illegitimate, extra-jurisdictional plea of organizing awareness and training on RTI Act? Neglecting his bona-fide domain of adjudication, he started behaving as a veritable funding agency distributing largesse to this or that pet NGO, organising through them costly ceremonies with boisterous extravaganza, addressing the same as Guest-in-Chief in full media glare, distributing awards and prizes, and sponsoring so-called Soochana Shibirs across the State through an arbitrarily hand-picked cohort of pliant NGOs. While indulging in such image-building acrobatics, he cared a fig for the established accounting procedures or of short-listing of grantee NGOs. The detail break-up of expenditures so incurred, criteria adopted for selecting the grantees and rationale behind engaging this or that service provider being still shrouded in unfathomable mystery, coupled with absolutely non-transparent and non-participatory manner of handling the so-called awareness and training events, all this certainly points to a large-scale manipulation and misappropriation of funds by Mr.Padhi himself. A comprehensive Social Audit into such extra-jurisdictional programmes, which were organized at the behest of Mr.Padhi abusing his office and authority, shall certainly unearth the massive scale bungling of public funds done with impunity by him and his kitchen coterie.
6) The fact of matter is that Mr.Padhi acted a wolf in the garb of a lamb with his hidden agenda of driving RTI Act stealthily but steadily to a silent burial in the land of Orissa. The funds so misappropriated by him served a handy ploy to achieve his murderous mission meticulously crafted against RTI Act. What he did first of all was to publish on behalf of the Commission a series of 3 booklets in the name of spreading awareness on RTI Act and Rules. The prime booklet was a compilation of English text and Oriya version of the RTI Act. The Oriya version is filled with so much of errors both silly and serious that a reader is bound to be misled and confused by it, resulting in his abrupt frustration with RTI Act itself. This author had way back in January 2007 pointed out some sample errors occurring in the official translation of Sections 17 and 18 of RTI Act suggesting therewith a thoroughgoing revision of the whole translation. Taking the cue Mr.Padhi corrected only some gross errors in Section 17, while leaving in tact the errors in Section 18 and rest of the translation. Knowing well that an important provision like Section 18 is a great tool in the hands of the complainants to get their grievances redressed through Commission, Mr. Padhi deliberately let it remain as erratic and incomprehensible as before. Even though the booklet has undergone 3 editions, each printed in 90,000 copies, Mr.Padhi is hell bent to keep in currency the mistranslated Act so as to confuse and mislead the public of Orissa about the real provisions of RTI Act. The same kind of pettifogging mischief informs the Oriya booklet on so-called FAQ, which is conspicuously silent on exemption of BPL people from fees towards cost of information, and also on the basic differences existing between user friendly Central Rules and cumbersome Orissa State Rules. Thus Mr.Padhi given his fishy approach to everything, has killed two birds with one bullet; keeping the people of the State in perpetual dark about RTI Act on one hand and misappropriating as much money as possible on account of publications, on the other.
7) The flawed publications released by the Commission apart, the decisions by Mr.Padhi himself and other Commissioners are also so much erratically written without any regard being paid to grammar that it becomes a matter of double disgrace to display them on the website of the Commission. Several complaints have been lodged before Governor Orissa under Section 17 of RTI Act demanding the ouster of Mr.Padhi and other negligent Commissioners on the ground of their sheer inefficiency to write grammatically correct language in their statutory decisions and communications.
7) Mr.Padhi in order to succeed fool-proof in his non-stop self-aggrandizement drive, shrewdly bypassed the mandatory compliance to an obligatory provision of RTI Act which in its Section 27 directs that all the officers and employees of the Commission along with their salary and allowances and terms and conditions of service shall be notified by the State Government in the Official Gazette. But Mr. Padhi, hand in glove with some vested interests in the top echelons of State bureaucracy, has ensured that no such notification be ever made, so that he would pick up the yes-men of his choice to fill up the strategic posts arbitrarily created by him. Again, it is solely Mr. Padhi himself, who has arbitrarily decided who should get how much and who should do what and the like. In the whole country, Orissa Information Commission not only is the most expensive of all State Commissions, but also has the biggest army of personnel to its dubious credit. But, in absence of a mandatory notification, Mr. Padhi as the big boss has been using and abusing them as his domestic servants. Otherwise, how is it, that one Mr. Kasinath Sahoo self-styled as Secretary to Commission blindly and shamelessly swears in the Affidavit to the above suit, 'I am the Petitioner', whereas the Cause List of the suit described Chief Orissa Information Commissioner as the Petitioner? Only because Mr. Sahoo himself enjoys the bonus of a 'bogus servant' thanks to the absence of a mandatory notification of his post, did he carry out Mr. Padhi's sweet will as blindly as he could, without any demur or murmur.
8) Mr. D.N.Padhi, a liar par excellence, never, ever fumbles in mouthing white lies ad infinitum before anybody, be they media, Government or public. Just a year back, he circulated a self-glorifying press release on behalf of Orissa Information Commission to both print and electronic media across the country that he had been adjudged, nay, congratulated as the best Information Commissioner of the country by the Founder of National RTI Award for imposing the highest number of penalties against the defaulter PIOs. But, just as every thief inadvertently leaves behind him clues of his thievery, he was caught red handed by RTI activists with the said Founder of Award clarifying that neither such award was announced in favour of Mr. D.N.Padhi nor the latter was ever congratulated by him. This instance brought to fore a pathological streak in Mr. Padhi bordering on 'moral turpitude', on the ground of which an allegation was lodged before Governor, Orissa demanding his immediate ouster as warranted under Section 17 of RTI Act.
9) That Mr.Padhi has indulged in all sorts of corrupt and underhand deals by using his adjudicatory powers is too evident from the dubious tenor of certain decisions pronounced by him. In one case while he admitted that the defaulter PIO was absconding from his office to escape attendance in the hearings of the Commission, he didn't however use his power of ordering an enquiry into the matter as required under Section 18(2) or of issuing summons against the abscondee as required under Section 18(3). Instead he simply closed the case taking a dubious plea that no penalty could be imposed on a PIO without giving him a reasonable opportunity of hearing as per Section 20(1) of RTI Act. This very gesture of Mr.Padhi in showing extra leniency towards a guilty, but abscondee PIO, did in fact embolden the whole tribe of officials to play mischief with the RTI users across the State. Next, while it is a regular practice with Mr.Padhi that he would invariably mention the name, designation and address of the opposite parties in the cause title of the decisions drafted by him, in certain decisions he was found, for reasons best known to himself, ominously omitting the names of the opposite parties. In fact, he has been actuated by dubious motives of graft and favoritism to conceal the said names.
10) Specifically Mr.D.N.Padhi in the capacity of Chief OIC is in collusion with the corrupt mining lobby of the state, as alleged by an Advocate and Editor of weekly Bartta Sri Alekh Chandra Tripathy. When Sri Tripathy aggrieved by the evasive reply of PIO of Orissa Mining Corporation Ltd Bhubaneswar approached Orissa Information Commission for justice, Mr.D.N.Padhi as the Chief OIC, instead of asking the concerned PIO to fully comply with Mr. Tripathy's request for information, arbitrarily ruled that every RTI application should contain only one broad question. By giving such a ruling purportedly made to defend the defaulter PIO, Mr.Padhi showed in unmistakable terms his partisanship with the corrupt mining lobby, as against the letter and spirit of RTI Act 2005. For the said Act nowhere stipulates that a single RTI application can't ask for information on several matters dealt with by a public authority. Mr.Tripathy has lodged a complaint under Section 17 of RTI Act before Governor of Orissa demanding the ouster of 'corrupt and inefficient' Chief OSIC Mr.D.N.Padhi from his post.
11) Mr.D.N.Padhi in his official capacity as Chief OSIC has set up an abominable precedent of double standards in respect of disclosure of property list by a public functionary. Soon after he made a big fuss in the media over his direction to all IAS and OAS officers of the State to submit suo motu disclosure of their property lists before their respective offices, the PIO of the Commission was approached through an RTI application to provide information on the property lists of all Commissioners including the Chief Mr.Padhi. Alas! The PIO in reply provided only a list immovable assets of the Commissioners, admitting inter alia that neither Mr.Padhi nor the other Commissioner has submitted any property list of movable assets (Vehicles, Bank balance, Insurance Policies, Shares and Bonds, Gadgets and Appliances etc) to the office. This act of hypocrisy amounting to moral turpitude was the subject of a Complaint against Mr.Padhi and other Commissioner made before Governor Orissa under Section 17 of RTI Act.
12) Mr. Padhi's hatred against the poor, especially the BPL people is so ingrained in his bone and marrow that he madly bursts out at them as and when he comes face-to-face with them. Knowing pretty well that the Proviso to Section 7(5) of RTI Act has exempted BPL persons from all kinds of fees, and an FAQ in English displayed on Commission's website itself categorically says so, Mr. Padhi, true to his snobbish streak, would, in his post-hearing Decisions, Annual Reports and as well in oral pronouncements, arbitrarily dictate that the BPL people have not been exempted from fees towards cost of information. Often he was found to justify his anti-BPL stance taking recourse to Orissa RTI Rules 2005, whereas the said Rules nowhere says that BPL persons have to pay the fees towards the cost of information. His anti-BPL phobia has reached such a pathogenic proportion that in course of a recent hearing he went on abusing a BPL appellant Mr. Kunja Bihari Patra in such uncivil words, "Can you get vegetables free of cost from the market by showing your BPL card"? The aggrieved appellant has lodged his allegation against Mr. Padhi demanding his ouster on the ground of misdemeanor under Section 17 of RTI Act.
13) Ever seized by a self-eulogizing tantrum, Mr D.N.Padhi has all along made too much fuss over his status as a constitutional authority equal to that of an Election Commissioner of India. But he is the man who has the scantiest regard for facts even in respect of Annual Reports authored by him, which have been laid in the State legislature. In one of such reports he stated a blatant lie that a law called Orissa RTI Act 2002 was enacted. In another place of one such Annual Report, he did say, simply to glorify the much vaunted Soochana Shibirs funded by him that as many as 38,800 RTI applications were submitted during the 10-day long Soochana Shibirs held across the State. When asked about the break-up of the said total, his office declined to reply. By serving false and misleading information through his Annual Reports, he has not only misled the public in general but also violated the privileges of the Assembly.
14) Mr. Padhi's knowledge of RTI Act is exclusively limited to its few provisions, which concern his status along with salaries and allowances as mentioned in Sections 15 and 16. So far other provisions of the Act are concerned, he is neither aware of nor interested to learn them. Consequently, in course of several decisions and pronouncements, he has made wild assertions, which simply run counter to the letter and spirit of law. For instance, he would arbitrarily say, 'Onus of proof lies on Complainant/ Appellant', 'BPL persons have to pay fees towards cost of information', 'Complaints around Section-4 don't come under purview of Commission's adjudication', 'Summons can be issued to any person including Complainant', and the like, which even a school kid knows to be patently false in terms of RTI Act. Further,
15) Being an incorrigible psychopath himself, Mr. D.N.Padhi spews at the slightest chance his ever boiling vendetta against those very activists who have remained critical of his misdoings in the capacity of Orissa Chief Information Commissioner. For instance, while in several decisions he rightly mentioned that the absence of the complainant in the concerned hearing was condonable in view of Rule 9(2) of Orissa Information Commission (Appeal Procedure) Rules 2006, in certain cases which involved those very complainants/ appellants who are his critics, he would misquoting the said Rule, rule just the opposite i.e. the absence of the complainant was not condonable, because 'summons' were issued to him by speed-post. If read in juxtaposition to his prosecution mania, his latest move to sue two citizens in the court of law for damages against defamation is not difficult to understand.
16) Mr.D.N.Padhi is the epitome of rank idiocy that willy-nilly spills out from his psychopathic mania for self-glorification, which has disgraced not only him as the Chief OSIC, but also the Orissa Information Commission and State of Orissa as a whole before the RTI watchers across the country. In most of the decisions drafted or dictated by him, he would unfailingly ensure that the honorific prefix 'Hon'ble' is placed before his name at least twice, once at the beginning, and then at the signature line. But mysteriously, he won't allow the said epithet to be used before the name of a State Information Commissioner. This author had in course of his several articles jokingly suggested that even Chief Justices of Supreme Court or of High Courts don't add the prefix 'Hon'ble' to their names while signing a decision. However, it is a matter of great pity that the foolhardy in Mr.Padhi failed to get at so commonplace, yet so sensitive a home truth as the above one.
17) Be that as it may, exit on superannuation from an office shall bring no salvage to the vainglorious record of Mr.D.N.Padhi's misappropriation and misfeasance spanning long 5 years of his tenure as Chief Orissa Information Commissioner. So long there is no requiem and recompense, tangible and adequate, made against the injustice done to BPL persons and harassment to hundreds of complainants, against the murderous betrayal done to the letter and spirit of RTI Act, against the misappropriation and corruption of the public exchequer, against the victimization unleashed towards RTI activists, against the organized vandalization wrought to the website and publications of the Commission, against the series of skewed and dubious decisions taken by the Commission, and above all against the nuisance caused by the unsavory, self-eulogizing use of words like 'Hon'ble', all during the notorious tenure of Mr.Padhi as Chief Orissa Information Commissioner, he shall ever remain a luminous epicenter of a never thawing, negative discourse running around Orissa Information Commission.
Chitta Behera
Cuttack, Orissa
Dt 17th Nov. 2010
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