The Centre for Governance and Public Accountability (CGPA) on Tuesday noted the poor implementation of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Right to Information (RTI) Law by provincial government departments.
The centre filed 152 information requests to 32 provincial departments and 120 to district level health, education, public health engineering, district courts and police departments.
The information requests were about the utilisation of development funds in fiscal year 2014-15 and revealed that Chitral and Upper Dir districts are worst performers, said a press release.
The centre, a non-governmental body, demanded affirmative action on part of the KP public bodies and RTI Commission for implementation of RTI law in the province.
It also demanded all administrative heads of public bodies at the districts and provincial level to fulfil their constitutional and legal responsibility to implement the RTI law in letter and spirit.
Public bodies should proactively disclose all information of public importance so that citizens could positively engage themselves in improving public service delivery, it concluded.
The centre revealing the information as requested, said that Nowshera and DI Khan turned out to be the best performers in implementation of KP Right to Information (RTI) Laws.
It said that at the provincial level, finance, food, information and public relations, and tourism departments are the best performers in implementation of the RTI law, while health, labour, law, mineral development, and Planning and Development (P&D) departments are the worst performers.
District courts and district education departments lie at the bottom of the district level departments’ ranking of five selected departments’ comparative performance, it said.
It observed that since Chitral and Upper Dir falls in Provincially Administered Trial Areas (PATA) and RTI law is yet to be extended there, the performance of the two districts was poor in responding to public queries.
It further said that among the settled districts, Abbottabad ranked the lowest with very poor response to RTI.
The Centre said the findings identify an emphatic necessity of affirmative action on part of the executive and change in mindset of the public bodies, adding that under the KP’s Right to Information law, every public body shall provide the requested information within 10 working days.
It said that out of 152 information requests, only 62 departments responded within 20 working days and 90 complaints were filed with the RTI commission.
Those 90 complaints should have been resolved within 60 days as per KP RTI law but only 50 could be resolved. 40 complaints are yet not resolved despite the lapse of 60 days, it added.