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Madhya Pradesh cites new rule: Pay GST, get RTI reply
Few things in the Bharatiya Janata Party government are questionable and are making people bang their head onto the wall. Among the major one include — Right to Information, Goods and Services Tax and Aadhaar. In the latest incident, an RTI activist in Madhya Pradesh was asked to pay GST for getting information from the Housing and Infrastructure Development Board in Bhopal under the transparency law.
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The RTI activist, Ajay Dubey, was surprised when to see that he paid Central CGST and the States GST at the rate of nine per cent each to get details of expenditure on the renovation of office of Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA), Madhya Pradesh. The official documents revealed that he had paid Rs 43 – Rs 36 as photocopy charges for 18 pages (at the rate of Rs two per page), Rs 3.5 as CGST and Rs 3.5 as SGST.
Expressing his surprised thoughts, as PTI reported, Dubey said, “It is unfair and illegal for a public authority to charge CGST and SGST for supply of information under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. I will appeal against this before the appropriate authority.”
It is to be known that the Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley-led GST had recommended in January: “to exempt supply of services by way of providing information under RTI Act, 2005 from GST”. Also, Central Information Commission (CIC) had in February, while hearing a case, had said that public authority cannot quote a price for the information, treating it as goods or service of sellable nature, reports Indian Express.
The Central Information Commissioner M Sridhar Acharyulu had then said, “Besides, giving information is not even service, being transparent is the inherent duty of public authority and Central Public Information Officer (CPIO) can only collect the cost of copying charges so that the government exchequer is not affected. Therefore, the demand of GST charges made by the CPIO is illegal and unreasonable.”
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