Bhubaneswar: Often miscreants try to harm the whistleblowers through inducements, issuing threats to their lives or mental humiliations. In the past, many whistleblowers who dared to expose rampant malpractices and illegal activities in various sectors of governance were brutally killed by the wrongdoers.
For instance, miscreants reportedly killed RTI activists Ranjan Kumar Das of Kendrapara in February 2020, Abhimanyu Panda of Kandhamal in December 2019, Ganesh Panda of Ganjam in 2014 and Krupasindhu Sahoo of Cuttack in 2015 for exposing various malpractices by the local administration. A state-based body of RTI activists claimed that during the past several years as many as 55 activists have received life threats from miscreants.
Despite this, Public Information Officers of the state Law department have been putting the RTI applicants’ life in danger. They are flouting all the guidelines by posting the details of the applicants on the ‘eDespatch’ website. In fact, they are accused of uploading the scanned copies of the applications along with the applicants’ details on the e-despatch site making the identity of the applicant public.
The state government introduced the eDespatch or electronic transfer of letters system to uploaded documents, and not details of the applicants, so that can be accessed by the general public. Recently, the Law department uploaded the scanned copy of one application in which the applicant had sought details related to Lord Jagannath’s land in Sakhigopal area of Puri that have been encroached upon by local influential persons.
“Who will be held responsible if the alleged encroachers inflict any harm on the applicant whose identity was made public by the PIOs of Law department,” questioned RTI activist Pradeep Kumar Pradhan. This is not an isolated case as the department has been posting the details of almost all the RTI applicants on the eDespatch site.
“The RTI application form used in Odisha also asks the applicant to provide personal details in contravention to Section 6(3) of the RTI Act,” added Pradhan. In 2013, the Kolkata High Court delivered a landmark judgment prohibiting the government PIOs from making public details of the applicants.
Following the judgment, the Department of Personnel and Training of the Union government and the state Information and Public Relations Department issued circulars to the PIOs to follow the court rulings for the safety of the applicants.
