After years of wait, Telangana’s online Right to Information (RTI) portal is now live.
The portal - www.rti.telangana.gov.in - allows users to register with a valid email address. Users have to enter their name, gender, email address, and enter a password eight to 20 characters in length. Users also have to enter a postal address, country, State, enter their PIN, and mobile phone number. Thus far, as many as 169 citizens have registered, the portal shows.
The portal lists six public authorities - the Office of Telangana Secretariat, the Office of Commissioner of Police, Hyderabad City Police, Charminar police station, Crime Branch CID, Kothapally police station, and Elgandal police station.
The website also indicates that as many as 193 RTIs, and four first appeals have been filed. As many as five public information officers and two first appellate authorities have been onboarded.
To file an RTI request, users are required to select a public authority, after clicking on “New Application” under the “RTI Request” dropdown. Next, they are required to enter personal information, including the user name, email address, mobile number, gender, postal address, State, and educational status. Users will then have to enter the RTI request, which, for the time, is limited to 3,000 characters. In case they wish to make a detailed query, they can upload a pdf file up to 5 MB in size as an “additional document”.
“In order to promote transparency and accountability in administration, this Section 6 (1) of RTI Act, 2005 and RTI Telangana Rules 2005 enables the citizens to apply RTI online application for any information from Department / HOD,” ticker on the website reads.
Activists have long been demanding an online RTI portal in the interest of transparency and convenience. The move was met with relief.
RTI activist S Q Masood, who had filed a public interest litigation for an online RTI portal in the Telangana High Court, and was represented through advocate Syed Mounis Jafar Abidi, welcomed the move. “This is late but a welcome moved and a good news for the residents of Telangana that the govt has introduced a portal, allowing them to conveniently file RTI applications from the comfort of their homes. Hope the portal will be fully functional soon,” he said on Thursday.
While the portal was developed by the Department of Information Technology, sources in the Telangana State Information Commission said that officials from that department held consultations with them and sought inputs. However, the sources said that they were unaware of the online portal going live.
