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• Information on Emergency:
1) Believe it or not, the government has claimed that it does not have any documents pertaining to the Emergency period. Neither the Prime Minister’s office nor the home ministry have given any response to RTI activist Manoranjan Roy who sought Information on the Emergency.
2) Earlier, V Narayanasamy, minister of state in the PMO, had acknowledged that official records on the Emergency are “not available in the PMO”. “A thorough search was made to retrieve and trace records of correspondence between the then PM and the President of India relating to proclamation of emergency. However, no such records were found in the PMO,” Narayanasamy said. The Central Information Commission (CIC) had then sought an investigation into the matter and said the government must “ensure that these records are retrieved or traced, wherever they might be, and should be preserved appropriately for citizens so that they can access them.”
Two years on, the reply to Roy’s query reveals that the documents are still missing. The home ministry has blamed the National Archives of India saying that it is the “repository of non-current records”. But the archives department officials say otherwise. A member of archival advisory board of the National Archives of India, on the condition of anonymity, said, “While the ministries are bound to transfer all records for archival, no records on the emergency were transferred to us for safe-keeping.”
• Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA) ground:
On the recommendation by NCP supremo Sharad Pawar, BMC handed over 39,950 sq.m. plot to the MCA to promote cricket without observing rules connected with such allotment of land. This information was obtained by Anjali Damania of AAP through the RTI route.
Damania alleges that rules did not allow for the plot to be developed. The BMC was supposed to give only operational rights to MCA. So, how could the MCA raise Rs.270 crore by way of membership fees on a BMC plot?”
