New Delhi: In a case first of its kind, the Delhi High Court has imposed a penalty on the MCD for misleading an applicant who sought certain information about an unauthorised construction under the Right to Information (RTI) Act.
Allowing a petition filed by one Ram Avtar Yadav, Justice S Ravindra Bhat directed MCD to pay Rs 30,000 to the petitioner within six weeks and also asked the civic agency to recover the money from the erring officials who had deliberately avoided giving proper information to the petitioner.
In July last year, Yadav had sought information from MCD slum and JJ department, Shahdra Zone regarding an illegal structure but the competent officials instead of furnishing the right information to Yadav asked him to approach DDA.
Yadav apprached the High Court after he failed to gather the information from DDA too. The MCD in its status report had admitted that the agency had allotted the land for the structure.
"Had the correct answers been provided, the petitioner might well have not approached the court. Instead every effort was made to block the petitioner's legitimate right to information," the court remarked.
Justice Bhat rejected the submission made by MCD counsel that the officials did not intentionally withhold the relevant information but the mistake was bonafide as there was some lack of co-ordination between two branches of MCD.
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