It refers to reports about Madhya Pradesh government raising RTI fees from present rupees 10 to rupees 100 with additional raised fees for filing First Appeals and Second Appeals at rupees 500 and 1000.
But RTI fees cannot be more than rupees 50 according to court-verdict. Rather Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) should notify that RTI fees and payment-mode should be uniform for all states and Competent Authorities. Earlier several Competent Authorities and states had fixed abnormally high RTI fees at rupees 500 according to power given to them under sections 27 and 28 of RTI Act. But negligible RTI fees of just rupees 10 fixed long back in the year 2005 by DoPT has lost relevance being one of the reasons for misuse of RTI Act.
Uniform RTI fees of rupees 50 inclusive of copying charges for first 20 copied pages should be there for all public-authorities and states. It will save man-hours and postal-charges for both public-authorities and RTI applicants in demanding and remitting copying charges. But additional RTI fees for First Appeals and Second Appeals must not be there.
It is senseless to burden postal-department and banking-system with excessively high handling cost of about rupees 50 for postal-department alone for a postal-order worth rupees 10 submitted as RTI fees, DoPT should ask postal-department to abide by repeated CIC-directives to issue special RTI stamps in denominations of rupees 2, 10 and 50 like erstwhile stamps issued for TV and radios.
However facility to submit post-free RTI applications addressed to central public-authorities can be made available at all about 160000 post-offices of the country rather than present just about 4500 post-offices. Fake RTI applications should be prevented by abiding with verdict of Punjab-Haryana High Court to make it compulsory to file ID proof with every RTI application, First Appeal and Second Appeal.
SUBHASH CHANDRA AGRAWAL