The reply does not cite any rule or section of the Right to Information Act while denying information.

“How can the Public Information Officer say that there is no public interest involved?. The information that has been asked for is nothing secret or personal. All of us are interested to know what is the maximum number of leaves taken by a judge as there are so many cases pending in courts,” said Advocate R K Garg.

Filing an application under the RTI Act in the UT District Courts is a herculean task in itself.

Right from the procedure of filing the application, contacting an authorised person in court and submitting the fees, the procedure is nothing but a string of harassing experiences.

To begin with, court employees are not aware of the procedure to file an RTI application. “Go arrange the notification, read it and then come here to file the application,” is the reply one gets.

A copy of the notification is available with court employees. After repeated requests, if you are allowed to read the notification, the next hurdle is locating the official concerned who will accept the application. Then there is the confusion about the mode of payment. When this reporter filed two RTI applications, officials said there was no fee for filing.

When the reporter insisted that there was a Rs 50 fee per application, officials said that court stamps worth Rs 50 may be purchased and pasted on the applications, the stamp worth Rs 30 on one and Rs 20 on the other.

On pointing out that according to the rules, Rs 50 has to be deposited for every application, the reporter got a casual reply from the other end. “If the need arises, we will call you and ask you to deposit more fee,” said an official. And this is exactly what happened.

Two weeks after filing the application, this reporter was told to submit some more money.

Sector-35 coaching centre refunds fees but forum insists on compensation
Despite the fact that a coaching centre refunded the fees to a student who did not attend classes, the institute has been told to pay a compensation of Rs 20,000 to the complainant for causing mental harassment to him.

The institute had refunded the fee two days after the student’s father approached the District Consumer Disputes Redressal Forum. The forum today directed the manager of FIITJEE Limited in Sector 35 to pay the money to a resident of Ambala city for deficiency in service. The forum said that once the petitioner had given a representation stating that his son could not clear his Class XI exams and had sought a refund of his fees, the institute should not have taken 6 months to act.

The petitioner, A K Walia, after inquiring about a weekend programme for Class XII had got his son, Saurabh Walia, enrolled for the course. He had paid Rs 63,416 for the session. Walia said his son could not get through his Class XI examinations so there was no point in making him attend the weekend programme. Walia gave a written representation to the institute and sought a refund of the fee. The institute asked the petitioner to furnish a copy of the Class XI marks sheet of his son. It later refused to refund the money.