Dear Comrades,
After four years of struggle, Indians travelling abroad and NRIs would be able to
file Right to Information (RTI) applications online through a dedicated portal
managed by the Department of Posts.
Indians living abroad had been finding it difficult to use the RTI Act effectively as
the government had not specified rules to pay the mandatory fee of 10 in foreign
currency through the Indian embassies and high commissions. Applicants were
largely depending on their friends back in India to pay the RTI fee.
However, now the government has decided to provide an Internet-based solution
through the Department of Posts to Indians living abroad for submission of RTI
applications.
The procedure, which has obtained the Reserve
Bank of India nod, is user-friendly and uses already-functional e-commerce
portal of Department of Posts, which has its own payment gateway.
To make an application, the applicant would have to login to the website and
go to 'RTI counter' on the portal. Registration would be mandatory for the
first-time applicant. After filling up the RTI application, and uploading of
passport copy, the applicant would be directed for payment of RTI fees through
electronic postal order.
The postal order would be generated from a special series and would be
captured by the application. It would then be assigned to the public information
officer (PIO) of
the department chosen by the applicant.
The struggle to streamline the RTI fee payment had started in 2008 when RTI
activist and ex-serviceman Commodore Lokesh Batra was visiting his daughter in
Boston. Batra had to file an RTI application and realized that there was no easy
way of paying the fee of 10 for filing of application.
"I had an appeal hearing in the Central
Information Commission the very next month. While the then Chief
Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah agreed to hear me through audio
conferencing, I found that filing an application back home was difficult,"
Commodore Batra told ET. Thus began his four-year fight to make it easy for
Indians living abroad to use the transparency law.
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-03-06/news/31127458_1_postal-order-commodore-lokesh-batra-rti-application
