Wednesday, February 2, 2011

RE: [HumJanenge] CIC's SLP papers being sold at Euro.100 per copy

Extracts from the minutes:

"Agenda 1: Retention Schedule for the Commission:

 

The Commission discussed the urgency of requirement of a retention schedule; and decided to adopt the same as laid down in the Manual of Office Procedure, DARPG, Government of India for all administrative & miscellaneous files. It was decided that all disposed off quasi judicial case files, that has attained the age of 6 months or more from its date of decision, shall be weeded out except those required in further legal proceeding in a superior court or those required in
non
compliance of orders of the Commission, recovery of penalty, compensation or disciplinary action as directed by the Commission. However, in all cases digitized version would be retained.

 

I request our member advocates like Shri Rajiv Yadav and Mr J N Sharma should give their opinion in the matter.  Whether digitized version has same legal value as the hard copies and decisions on website and it will be easily available to the citizens. If the facility has been utilized to its full capacity, some fresh facility may be created with slight different name and the old one can the utilized for the record purpose only.

 

However, I fail to understand the reasons of the old decisions being deleted from the CIC's website and going to lodge my protest on this with CCIC by sending the mail on the lines of the letter sent by Shri Sarabjit Roy.

 

This matter is serious. Decisions taken in 2005-06 may not be available on CIC's website.  Even I had to send an e-mail to Hon'ble Chief Information Commissioner for one decision and that mail was forwarded to Mr. Pankaj K.P. Shreyaskar, Jt. Registrar by PPS of the CCIC under intimation to me. CIC also informed me the e-mail id and phone number of Jt. Reg. but no where wrote to email me decision. Mail is reproduced hereunder:

 

"I have forwarded your request to Shri Pankaj K.P. Shreyaskar, Joint Registrar of the CIC.  His phone number is 26717354 and his email id is pkp.shreyaskar@nic.in"

From

PPS to the CIC"

 

In the aforesaid mail, PPS has nowhere advised the Jt. Registrar to send the decision and I have not received the decision though I requested for the same on 23rd January.  Today, I reminded the Jt. Registrar about this by sending an e-mail.  Now, it seems that I will have to go to CIC personally for taking copy of the decision which relates to the case of Dr. V.K. Rao v/s. Shri Jaswant Singh and ors pronounced on 21.04.2006. For me, it may be OK but what about applicants residing at far-flung areas. This aforesaid case was cited to me by the CPIO of NSD, AIR but he did not take the pain to send the copy of the decision along with his reply.  In the absence of the decision, how I shall argue my case before CIC?. On the website, when I was searching this decision, the message is "no records found".   

 

I also endorse the suggestion that CIC should compile the decisions and publish them or the same can be undertaken by some government recognized publisher of law books so that the decisions reported in the publication are recognized by the Courts during proceedings.  
--- On Wed, 2/2/11, Dr. NC JAIN <j_nc@hotmail.com> wrote:


From: Dr. NC JAIN <j_nc@hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: [HumJanenge] CIC's SLP papers being sold at Euro.100 per copy
To: humjanenge@googlegroups.com
Date: Wednesday, 2 February, 2011, 5:18 PM

Dear sir
     It is verygood step. In my opinion,we all should write such letters to CIC and records should not be destroyed. Records can be collected in the form of a book and published by CIC office. They can then be sold at reasonable price like  any other publication.
Dr N C Jain
2-2-11
 

Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2011 23:57:04 +0530
Subject: [HumJanenge] CIC's SLP papers being sold at Euro.100 per copy
From: sroy.mb@gmail.com
To: humjanenge@googlegroups.com

To:
The Chief Information Commissioner of India
August Kranti Bhawan,
Bhikaji Cama Place
New Delhi

2, Feb 2011

Kind Attn: Mr Satyanand Mishra

Respected Sir,

I beg to inform you about the downside / inherent dangers of the CIC's recent decision to weed out / destroy its old case records.

I was shocked to see that important/landmark CIC decisions of year 2006 which have been deleted from the CIC's records and which are no longer accessible on either of the CIC's websites, are being sold by private legal publishers at Euro 100 per decision. I refer in particular to the CIC decision in "Appeal No. 10/1/2005-CIC" titled as "ER. SARBAJIT ROY v. DELHI DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY." which is now before the Supreme Court in SLP jurisdiction. One of the websites selling this otherwise unavailable landmark decision is at URL [http://www.ejurix.in/Cases/CIC/CIC-NA/99Mon9999%20(GJX)%200102%20CIC.htm]

Clearly, the implications of the CIC's new weeding out policy, which incidentally also transgress provisions of the "Public Records Act" is anti-citizen and has not been carefully thought out, and it requires public consultation before the Intellectual Property rights to CIC "judgments" are sold off / gifted away to private persons to fulfill the State's mandate.

I would be obliged if this matter is examined before the weeding out policy is fully implemented.

Yours faithfully

Sarbajit Roy
B-59 Defence Colony
New Delhi 110024


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