Around 60% of the applications received under the Right to Information Act in Haryana in 2018 were to seek information from the police department, a reply to an RTI query has revealed. Besides, the State Information Commission has not spent a single penny to create awareness on the RTI Act in the State over the past nine years.
68,393 applications
Of the total 68,393 applications filed under the RTI Act to various departments, the maximum, 41,888, were to seek information from the police department followed by Rohtak Maharishi Dayanad University (3,995), Food and Supplies Department (2,832) and Public Health Engineering Department (2,057), according to the information furnished by the State Information Commission (SIC) in reply to separate RTI applications by P.P. Kapoor, a Panipat based RTI activist.
Salaries, allowances
The annual budget of the SIC has increased 35 times to ₹8.75 crore from ₹25 lakh over the past 14 years, but a major share of it, around ₹52.14 crore, was spent on the salaries and allowances of the Information Commissioners and the staff and the other office expenses.
The SIC spent only 0.03 % of the total budget so far, which comes around ₹1.59 lakh, on holding five programmes, three in Panchkula and one each in Hisar and Kurukshetra, from 2009-2011 to create awareness on the law.
