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Right to Information/ Transparency/ Accountability/ Right to Hearing | About to marry? Run an RTI check first by Tapas Chakraborty

About to marry? Run an RTI check first by Tapas Chakraborty

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published Published on Apr 26, 2011   modified Modified on Apr 26, 2011

When her parents found a groom for her last August, young BPO executive Pratiksha Sharma was reconciled to the idea of arranged marriage but not to any possible dark sides in her would-be husband’s past.

So the 25-year-old BBA graduate secretly got in touch with Manish Kumar, her family lawyer in hometown Meerut, who tossed the idea of checking her future life partner’s background using the Right to Information Act (RTI).

All she had to do was to file an RTI application with Meerut’s superintendent of police (crime). The results belied her fears. “Thankfully, there was nothing wrong with my husband’s background and it put my mind at ease,” said Pratiksha, married and living with her husband in Delhi where both work.

Pratiksha isn’t alone. Several women in crime-prone western Uttar Pradesh have turned to the RTI, so far seen as a tool to ensure transparency in public life and fight corruption, to conduct checks on future husbands.

Most of the women determined to ferret out their prospective husbands’ antecedents are from educated and affluent families. “They are educated, well informed and don’t want to take any chances with their life. Often, their parents help them get such information,” said a senior officer in Muzaffarnagar, one of the districts where such RTI queries have been filed with police.

In the past year, Meerut police have received 375 such posers and answered 300 of them, while the rest were rejected on “technical grounds” such as incorrect formats, the district police chief (crime), Shafiq Ahmad, said.

“Under the act, we are supposed to provide specific information on criminal cases and convictions, if any. Since last year, we have been flooded with applications by women keen to know whether their future husbands had a crime record,” said Ahmad.

According to the RTI Act, “information which relates to personal information” can be disclosed “if the central public information officer or the state public information officer or the appellate authority, as the case may be, is satisfied that the larger public interest justifies the disclosure of such information”.

“While filing questions on crime background checks, you have to be specific in your query, and should not intrude into the privacy of a person. Care is taken to ensure that the question is properly worded. This is a sensitive area. In most cases, however, we see the questions are to the point, not general or vague,” says noted RTI activist and Ghaziabad lawyer Salil Gupta.

H.N. Singh, one of the officers who has been handling such RTI queries in Meerut, admitted that his department was swamped with such questions but made it clear that the identities of the applicants were never revealed. “We do not divulge the details of the individuals who make the applications,” said Singh. Both he and district police chief Ahmad attributed the increase in such pleas to rising crimes.

But some are going beyond criminal histories and using RTI to check for possible polygamy.

Puja Yadav was desperate to confirm rumours that the man she was to tie the knot with next month was married before. The young college teacher from Baghpat had filed an RTI application with the local marriage registrar this February but the plea was rejected.

She then took the help of an RTI activist and filed an appeal in the zonal office in Meerut. Her fears were confirmed: the man was married in 2005. She called off the wedding immediately.

But some warn the act can be a double-edged sword and may be abused for personal reasons. R.K. Sharma, an RTI activist himself, filed an application seeking information about a young medical student in a government college in Pilibhit last month. It later emerged that Sharma wanted the details as he saw the youth as a prospective groom for his daughter. His application was rejected.

 

The Telegraph, 26 April, 2011, http://telegraphindia.com/1110426/jsp/nation/story_13903326.jsp  


The Telegraph, 26 April, 2011, http://telegraphindia.com/1110426/jsp/nation/story_13903326.jsp


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