Certificates of Govt Employees under RTI

Date: 28-01-2015                                               By email

To,

Shri Basant Seth,

Information Commissioner,

Central Information Commission

August Kranti Bhawan, Bhikaji Cama Place,

New Delhi110066

Email: b.seth@nic.in

Hon’ble Sir,

Subject: Your Decision No. CIC/BS/A/2014/000332+000344+000345+000349/6804 dated 20-01-2015

 – Certificates of Govt Employees

This bears reference to your captioned decision, and specially following para:

“Educational qualification and other certificates submitted by the candidates in connection with their recruitment are in the nature of personal information about a third party. The employees might have filed these documents before the appointing authority for the purpose of seeking employment, but that is not reason enough for this information to be brought into the public domain to which anybody could have access, unless the petitioner is able to establish that the information sought is for larger public purpose. The CPIO’s submission claiming exemption under Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act is in order”

I invite your kind reference to my attached letter dated 25-07-2014, addressed to Chief Information Commissioner, with copy to you. Your captioned decision also suffers from all the infirmities pointed out in my letter dated 25-07-2014.

I humbly request you to reconsider this issue for future decisions lest entire details of govt. servants will be out of RTI and public scrutiny. This is dangerous especially when large number of recruitment scams is surfacing.  This opaqueness will result in deterioration of quality of public servants which in turn will affect good governance.

Thanking you,