Nagaland has topped the list of the highest number of RTI applications received from 2006-2007 to 2016-2017 at 24,896 followed by Goa at 20,892 among the small states category. However, the state has reported a decline in the number of RTI applications from 4526 in 2015-16 to 4344 during 2016-17.
Five states of Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Sikkim, Nagaland and Tripura have reported declining trend in the number of RTI applications.
This was revealed by secretary, National Informatics Centre (NIC) Nagaland, Worhonthung Ezung, in a letter on Thursday. The letter said the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) in its rapid review 4.0 (earlier called Rapid Study) published on March 12 has mentioned that the Nagaland Information Commission is the lone example of perfect statutory compliance among the information commissions in the country which has all the annual reports on its website.
The CHRI has been studying the state of the working of all the information commissions and the use of the RTI law by the citizens since 2013. The study is based on the annual reports of the information commissions across India available on public domains.
The study also found that Nagaland is among the nine states along with the Central Information Commission which has displayed updated case pending data on their websites, the letter said.
Nagaland is also reported to have the highest number of translations of the RTI Act in local dialects in the country. Besides the translation of the law into the different dialects spoken by various communities/tribes living in the state, the Nagaland Information Commission has displayed ‘RTI User Guide/Citizens’ Guide’ in rich text format (RTF) in all those languages on its website.