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Sanjiv Sinha
NEW DELHI, Oct 22: Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has asked Union Urban Affairs Minister Ram Jethmalani to shelve his unilateral decision to make files in his ministry open to public scrutiny.
Sources said that the Prime Minister, in a letter to Jethmalani on Wednesday, has asked the Minister to defer his decision to introduce glasnost in his ministry till it is regularised for all government organisations. The letter is understood to have conveyed to the Minister that such a sensitive and far-reaching decision could not be taken unilaterally by a single ministry and that comprehensive guidelines would have to be drawn up for the government as a whole.
In this context, the Prime Minister is also believed to have drawn Jethmalani's attention to the fact that a group of ministers were already considering the need to frame the Right to Information Bill and also suitably amend the Official Secrets Act.
Vajpayee is said to have assured Jethmalani that the task of framing specific guidelines to opengovernment files to the public would also be undertaken by the group of ministers. Incidentally, Jethmalani is a member of the group of ministers, which is headed by Union Home Minister L K Advani.Speaking to The Indian Express on Wednesday, Jethmalani confirmed that he had received a letter from the Prime Minister asking him to defer his decision. ``I have conveyed to the Prime Minister that I will abide by his decision on the issue...in any case, the decision cannot be implemented immediately as thousands of files in the ministry have to be indexed,'' he said.
Vajpayee's intervention is being viewed as an attempt to nip in the bud another round of confrontation between Jethmalani and the bureaucracy headed by the Cabinet secretary (which is opposed to Jethmalani's decision to make files public).
Jethmalani has, however, defended his decision to make ministry files public. In a letter to his ministry officials on Wednesday, copies of which have been sent to the Cabinet secretary and the PMO, he is learntto have stated that the government had no right to legislate on the Right to Information as the Supreme Court has ruled that this is guaranteed under the Constitution to every citizen.
Jethmalani's letter to his officials, sources said, was triggered off by Cabinet Secretary Prabhat Kumar's move to summon Urban Affairs Special Secretary S S Chattopadhyay and verbally ask him to put the Minister's orders on hold.
Around a fortnight back, Jethmalani had dramatically announced his decision to make the functioning of his ministry transparent by throwing open files to the public. He followed this up by framing elaborate guidelines by which any file in the ministry could be accessed by the public on payment of a token fee of Rs 10. The exceptions to this were files where Cabinet decisions were required or where budget proposals were involved.
Meanwhile, Jethmalani denied reports that the PMO had shot down his proposal to go to Sri Lanka on an official tour. The Minister said that he had never approached thePMO for an official tour since he was going to attend the SAARC Lawyers Conference in Sri Lanka in his private capacity. Jethmalani maintained that he had never planned to take his ministerial staff with him to Sri Lanka.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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