RTI Act completes four years

MANGALDAI/SIVASAGAR/DIPHU, Oct 13: Along with the rest of the State, the Darrang district administration and Karbi Anglong organized a week-long RTI Week, to mark the completion of four years of the Right to Information Act 2005, which concluded yesterday. A district-level RTI awareness meeting was held on the occasion at the Mangaldai district library auditorium. A day-long workshop on Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005 was also held at the conference hall of Sivasagr District Rural Development Agency recently. Held under the aegis of Sivasagar District Administration, the workshop aimed at sensitizing the government officials and community leaders about the various aspects of the RTI Act, 2005.

A district-level workshop on the act was held yesterday in the Karbi Anglong Deputy Director of Information and Public Relations (Hills) office premises. The workshop was held under the presidentship of Karbi Anglong Cultural Affairs Deputy Director Hemari Tokbi.

Darrang ADC Basudev Das chaired the meeting while A Nuri and Jyotish Nath participated as resource persons and explained various aspects of the act. DIPRO Pranjit Hazarika gave the welcome address at the meeting. Leading citizen Dr Girish Goswamai, Rajendra Baruah, Topeshwar Sarma, Arun Baruah and journalist Bhargav Kumar Das suggested various effective measures for proper implementation of the Act.

Inaugurating the workshop in Sivasagar, Sivasagar Deputy Commissioner NM Hussain spoke about the different aspects of the act and hoped that the act would go a long way in warding off corruption. Citing a few examples, he said that a few individuals and organizations have been misutilizing the act and appealed to everyone to abstain from misutilizing the act.

“Providing information on certain queries involved a cumbersome process and a lot of time is spent in collecting the information”, Hussain said. Citing an example, he said, “A farmers’ association came to us with a query and it took about nine months to collect the information and when we were ready with the documents, the organization did not come forward to collect it.”

“We had to engage a few officials and staff full-time to collect the datas and the time and effort could have been utilized in a productive way”, Hussain said. Sibsagar College vice-principal Monica Saikia moderated the workshop. Bikash Dey and Himadri Jyoti Dutta were the resource persons, who detailed about the different aspects of the act. SDO (C) Sewali Bordoiloi and Additional Deputy Commissioner Ananta Baruah also spoke on the occasion.

Deputy director of Information and Public Relations (Hills), Diphu, Shekhar Engti, while adressing the meeting in Karbi Anglong, spoke about the need of the workshop. A similar meeting was also organized by the Karbi Anglong Journalist Association under the initiative of Ajir Pharidoot editor Mukul Boruah at the Diphu market complex. The Karbi Mahila Samity organized a meeting on RTI Act at its office premises in Diphu recently. THE SENTINEL