The Prime Minister’s Office should not have deliberately ignored the will that the Parliament had expressed in the RTI Act, and the spirit of the Rules and Office Memoranda (OM) issued by the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) in responding to RTI requests.
As the day’s hearing started, the bench said: “We have received a note of a list of dates of action taken by the ministries and nothing else is there in the note.”
The Central government has replied a categorical “No”, to Congress MP Rahul Gandhi’s written question in Parliament today on the status of PM CARES vis-à-vis the RTI Act.
A divisional bench of the court, comprising Chief Justice D.N. Patel and Justice Prateek Jalan, while hearing the matter through video conferencing, stated: “This seems to be a motivated PIL against the ICAI’s chief.”
Even as PM Modi and ex-CAG Rajiv Mehrishi push for government transactions to be done electronically, major deals and funds are out of the purview of the CAG’s audit.
Ever since the Fund was created, it has been beset by controversy for being non-transparent. Though this has reached the SC, the centre is in no mood to answer any questions
The declaration of Covid-19 as a pandemic, followed by a nationwide lockdown to contain the virus, led to both public and private donations pouring in to help states and people, especially migrant workers