BBMP refuses to reopen its RTI Cell

Ever since BBMP closed down its RTI (Right to Information) Cell five years back, it’s been tougher for citizens to get information about BBMP’s decisions and actions. For 11 years (2006 to 2017), the BBMP head office had a fairly active central RTI Cell that accepted all RTI requests. The applicant only had to address the request to the ‘PIO (Public Information Officer), BBMP’, and the PIO in charge of the RTI Cell would forward the request to the concerned officer.
Since the closure of the Cell in 2017, citizens have to identify the specific PIO in charge of the department/area that the RTI inquiry relates to. Not an an easy task given that the BBMP has over 500 PIOs across the city.
You have to do a lot of physical enquiries yourself, said Kodur Venkatesh, an RTI activist. For example, when trying to get information about a particular road, some may say that the local division had built the road, others may say the Major Roads Department at the head office did it, or the PWD or State Highways department did it. So you have to personally meet many officers, and most of them are unfriendly. But you have to identify the right PIO, and then file the RTI with him. Else your application won’t get any response.
Meeting the right officer is also difficult as officers are frequently out on field work. And others in their department may not be cooperative in giving information or even receiving the application. Applications that require information from multiple offices would be even more difficult to file.
Even when filed properly, most applications don’t get any response, and then the next step is to identify the right appellate officer, says Venkatesh. Nobody would know who this officer is. BBMP’s Central control rooms do help with contact details of the zonal offices, but the zonal control rooms are not helpful. For ordinary people, the process is almost impossible to follow.
Currently, the BBMP website does have an outdated list of PIOs and appellate authorities which is available only in Kannada, with many of the phone numbers given not working.
RTI activists have tried many avenues to get the RTI Cell to reopen. They even got the state’s Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms (DPAR) to direct BBMP to reopen the Cell. But BBMP has not responded to the DPAR directive.