Puducherry Ports Dept sits tight on CIC’s order to disclose PPP info

By Venkatesh Nayak*
Readers may remember the major controversy over the coverage of Public Private Partnerships (PPP) under The Right to Information Act, 2005 (RTI Act) during the tenure of the United Progressive Alliance Government. While the Central Information Commission (CIC) wanted them to be covered by the RTI Act, the now defunct Planning Commission was hesitant to act immediately. Pursuant to this controversy, in August 2011, I had filed an RTI application with the Department of Ports, Puducherry asking for the Concession Agreement relating to the PPP project. After four years, the CIC has ordered that the Concession Agreement be disclosed after severing those portions relating to commercial confidentiality. Despite the order being passed in June 2015, the Department of Ports, Puducherry has neither sent me the information nor issued notice challenging the CIC’s decision in the High Court.
Thanks to the very vocal demand made by the RTI fraternity in India and the numerous cases piling up before the CIC demanding access to information about PPPs in January 2011, the then Chief Information Commissioner sent a letter to the now defunct Planning Commission with the following recommendations:
(1) that every PPP proposal including the draft agreement be made public inviting people’s comments on it;
(2) the PPP agreement include a clause requiring that the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) created for the purpose of implementing the PPP project become a public authority under the RTI Act; and
(3) that the Ministry/public authority responsible for the PPP project also become directly responsible for making all permissible information transparent under the RTI Act.
The then deputy chairman of the Planning Commission (PC) replied quickly to the CIC stating that it would not be proper for the Planning Commission to expand the jurisdiction of the CIC through PPP agreements. So the PC would seek legal opinion from the Department of Legal Affairs. Meanwhile, he pointed out that Concession Agreements, Maintenance Manuals, Maintenance Programmes and Maintenance Requirements can be obtained by any person from the concessionaire.
Having accessed this correspondence from the CIC website I decided to test the truth of the PC’s claim that any person could obtain the concession Agreement even outside the RTI Act. I randomly chose the Puducherry PPP project as it would fall under the Government of India and therefore would be subject to the jurisdiction of the CIC which I could access easily being based in Delhi. Given the confidence of the PC in the willingness of the concessionaire to part with copies of the concession agreements, I decided to check whether a similar commitment to transparency exists within the Department of Ports, Puducherry.
I filed an RTI application seeking a copy of the concession agreement. The public information officer (PIO) of the Department of Ports did not even bother to send a reply to my RTI application. The matter finally escalated to the CIC in second appeal as the first appellate authority rejected my request on the ground that the concession agreement contained a confidentiality clause.
The CIC heard my second appeal in May 2014 – more than 2 years later – and asked the Department of Ports to file a status report on the PPP project. During the hearing it transpired that the PPP had been shelved after prolonged litigation before courts. Nevertheless the Department of Ports pleaded commercial confidentiality against disclosure.
I submitted a rejoinder at the hearing arguing why it is in the public interest that such information should be disclosed. The CIC passed an interim order directing the Department of Ports to give further details of the court cases and reserved its final order.

CIC Orders disclosure of the PPP Concession Agreement sans matters of commercial confidence

Finally, after more than a year of reserving its order, in June 2015 the CIC has issued a final order directing the Department of Ports to disclose the Concession Agreement after severing the information related to commercial confidence. I have not yet received a hard copy of the CIC’s order. I found it on the website. Strangely, the Department of Ports has also not responded to me either with the information required to be disclosed or its intention to challenge the CIC’s order before the Courts. More than two months have passed since the CIC’s order.
Meanwhile, the NITI Ayog has replaced the Planning Commission. The Central Government has constituted a committee in May 2015 to review the PPP mode of infrastructure development. During the UPA regime a database for all PPPs projects had been established (http://www.pppindiadatabase.com/). While this website has become defunct, the NDA Government has created a new website for infrastructure-related PPP projects (https://infrastructureindia.gov.in/).
The new website is similar to the old one in many ways. It is not clear why the earlier website could not have been used. RTI users as activists might like to file requests asking for the reasons why the old website was junked and the new one created and how much it actually costs the Government to manage the new website.
In 2013 the Department of Personnel and Training issued guidelines for improved proactive disclosure of information under Section 4 of the RTI Act. a wealth of information relating to PPPs is now required to be disclosed by the ministries/departments/public authorities responsible for the PPPs. National Highways Authority of India is one of the public authorities that is displaying PPP agreements and other related information.
Meanwhile, I wait for the PPP agreement to reach me from across the Vindhyas. Will the Central Government’s review committee recommend greater transparency in all PPP projects? That remains to be seen.
—
*Programme Coordinator, Access to Information Programme, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, New Delhi

Comments

Urgent need to study cause of large number of natural deaths in Gulf countries

By Venkatesh Nayak* According to data tabled in Parliament in April 2018, there are 87.76 lakh (8.77 million) Indians in six Gulf countries, namely Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). While replying to an Unstarred Question (#6091) raised in the Lok Sabha, the Union Minister of State for External Affairs said, during the first half of this financial year alone (between April-September 2018), blue-collared Indian workers in these countries had remitted USD 33.47 Billion back home. Not much is known about the human cost of such earnings which swell up the country’s forex reserves quietly. My recent RTI intervention and research of proceedings in Parliament has revealed that between 2012 and mid-2018 more than 24,570 Indian Workers died in these Gulf countries. This works out to an average of more than 10 deaths per day. For every US$ 1 Billion they remitted to India during the same period there were at least 117 deaths of Indian Workers in Gulf ...

A comrade in culture and controversy: Yao Wenyuan’s revolutionary legacy

By Harsh Thakor* This year marks two important anniversaries in Chinese revolutionary history—the 20th death anniversary of Yao Wenyuan, and the 50th anniversary of his seminal essay "On the Social Basis of the Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique". These milestones invite reflection on the man whose pen ignited the first sparks of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and whose sharp ideological interventions left an indelible imprint on the political and cultural landscape of socialist China.

India's health workers have no legal right for their protection, regrets NGO network

Counterview Desk In a letter to Union labour and employment minister Santosh Gangwar, the civil rights group Occupational and Environmental Health Network of India (OEHNI), writing against the backdrop of strike by Bhabha hospital heath care workers, has insisted that they should be given “clear legal right for their protection”.

Uttarakhand tunnel disaster: 'Question mark' on rescue plan, appraisal, construction

By Bhim Singh Rawat* As many as 40 workers were trapped inside Barkot-Silkyara tunnel in Uttarkashi after a portion of the 4.5 km long, supposedly completed portion of the tunnel, collapsed early morning on Sunday, Nov 12, 2023. The incident has once again raised several questions over negligence in planning, appraisal and construction, absence of emergency rescue plan, violations of labour laws and environmental norms resulting in this avoidable accident.

History, culture and literature of Fatehpur, UP, from where Maulana Hasrat Mohani hailed

By Vidya Bhushan Rawat* Maulana Hasrat Mohani was a member of the Constituent Assembly and an extremely important leader of our freedom movement. Born in Unnao district of Uttar Pradesh, Hasrat Mohani's relationship with nearby district of Fatehpur is interesting and not explored much by biographers and historians. Dr Mohammad Ismail Azad Fatehpuri has written a book on Maulana Hasrat Mohani and Fatehpur. The book is in Urdu. He has just come out with another important book, 'Hindi kee Pratham Rachna: Chandayan' authored by Mulla Daud Dalmai.' During my recent visit to Fatehpur town, I had an opportunity to meet Dr Mohammad Ismail Azad Fatehpuri and recorded a conversation with him on issues of history, culture and literature of Fatehpur. Sharing this conversation here with you. Kindly click this link. --- *Human rights defender. Facebook https://www.facebook.com/vbrawat , X @freetohumanity, Skype @vbrawat

Job opportunities decreasing, wages remain low: Delhi construction workers' plight

By Bharat Dogra* It was about 32 years back that a hut colony in posh Prashant Vihar area of Delhi was demolished. It was after a great struggle that the people evicted from here could get alternative plots that were not too far away from their earlier colony. Nirmana, an organization of construction workers, played an important role in helping the evicted people to get this alternative land. At that time it was a big relief to get this alternative land, even though the plots given to them were very small ones of 10X8 feet size. The people worked hard to construct new houses, often constructing two floors so that the family could be accommodated in the small plots. However a recent visit revealed that people are rather disheartened now by a number of adverse factors. They have not been given the proper allotment papers yet. There is still no sewer system here. They have to use public toilets constructed some distance away which can sometimes be quite messy. There is still no...

Women's rights leaders told to negotiate with Muslimness, as India's donor agencies shun the word Muslim

By A Representative Former vice-president Hamid Ansari has sharply criticized donor agencies engaged in nongovernmental development work, saying that they seek to "help out" marginalizes communities with their funds, but shy away from naming Muslims as the target group, something, he insisted, needs to change. Speaking at a book release function in Delhi, he said, since large sections of Muslims are poor, they need political as also social outreach.

Warning bells for India: Tribal exploitation by powerful corporate interests may turn into international issue

By Ashok Shrimali* Warning bells are ringing for India. Even as news drops in from Odisha that Adivasi villages, one after another, are rejecting the top UK-based MNC Vedanta's plea for mining, a recent move by two senior scholars Felix Padel and Samarendra Das suggests the way tribals are being exploited in India by powerful international and national business interests may become an international issue. In fact, one has only to count days when things may be taken up at the United Nations level, with India being pushed to the corner. Padel, it may be recalled, is a major British authority on indigenous peoples across the world, with several scholarly books to his credit.

Gujarat Bitcoin scam worth Rs 5,000 crore "linked" with BJP leaders: Need for Supreme Court monitored probe

By Shaktisinh Gohil* BJP hit a jackpot in the form of demonetisation, which it used as an alibi to convert black money into white in Gujarat. Even as party scrambles for answers of how the Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank (ADCB), whose director is BJP president Amit Shah, received old currency worth Rs 745.58 crore in just five days, and how Rs 3118.51 crore was deposited in 11 district cooperative banks linked with Gujarat BJP leaders, a new mega Bitcoin scam, worth more than Rs 5,000 crore has been unraveled.

Counterview

Search This Blog