Most of us would have read the story of how Alagiri and Didi are the biggest absentees at Cabinet meetings. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Alagiri-Mamata-lead-list-of-absent-ministers/articleshow/6084101.cms
We also read in the press how the great RTI Activist Subhash Chand Agrawal extracted the information in RTI from the Cabinet Secretariat. But, what we do not read in the newspapers is how these RTI 'haramis' operate, and how Mr Habibullah is doing everything in his power to facilitate them. Last year Mr Shekkhar Singh of NCPRI applied for about 50,000 pages of documents from the CIC. He wanted copies of all appeals and complaints filed in the CIC and also their High Court pleadings. To save money he demanded that all these be digitised and given to him at Rs.50 on a CD. The matter was dismissed in First Appeal but crucially the First Appellate Mr Mohd Halim Khan was compromised and he allowed the material to be given without following 3rd party procedures u/s 11. He also demanded the cost of digitising the documents (ie. 67 paise per page) from Mr Shekhar Singh - the bill worked out to about Rs. 27,000/-. Shekhar Singh refused to pay even this and wrote a letter / email to Mr Habibullah. Mr Habibullah then orally instructed Pankaj Shreyaskar to digitise all the records sought by Shekhar Singh so that he could be given it on CD at Rs. 50. This was done about 4-5 months back. Singh's foreign financed 'study group' stumbled on a long pending 2nd appeal from Abhishek Shukla (who had sought details of attendance at all cabinet meetings and been refused) and promptly got their in-house proxy Subhash Agrawal to file an RTI to Cab Sec for this info. Mr Pankaj Shreyaskar is said to have personally phoned the Cabinet Secretariat (probably on instructions from Habibullah or NCPRI) to ensure that the information was given to Agrawal because "it has now been established that such information is not exempt from disclosure". Different rules for different folks ??.
