“Under the Right to Information Act (RTI), I queried the Maharashtra State Education Board about the selection procedure to appoint evaluators and moderators for board exams. Even though it is expected that the information should be furnished within a month, I received the data after 40 days. What I observed is that government offices are very passive while treating RTI applications and many even feel that citizens file an RTI to deliberately annoy them,” said city resident Ujwala Hatagle, a schoolteacher, who recently completed a special certificate course in RTI from Yashwantrao Chavan Academy of Development Administration (YASHADA), the administrative training institute of the government of Maharashtra.

Gearing up: Authorities at YASHADA will soon kick-start a project wherein the RTI cell of the institute will conduct an in-depth analysis of information secured from around 800 government offices across the state, collected by students