The Finance Ministry has challenged before the Delhi High Court an order of Central Information Commission directing it to designate at least one officer to whom RTI applications related to Ministry can be addressed.

The Finance Ministry has five departments-- Economic Affairs, Revenue, Expenditure, Financial Services and Disinvestment.

Each one of them have different sets of Central Public Information Officers for processing RTI applications but there is none to process queries which are directed to the Ministry.

"In case a CPIO is appointed for the Ministry of Finance, the implementation of the provisions of the Right to Information Act, 2005 and processing of all RTI applications of all departments of the Ministry of Finance would become difficult and extremely time consuming which will result in prejudice to the citizens of the country as well," Finance Ministry has pleaded before the High Court.

The case relates to RTI application filed by Subhash Agrawal seeking information related to use of currency notes to felicitate the then Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati in 2010. Agrawal had addressed his application to the CPIO of the Finance Ministry.

The Ministry returned the application claiming that they do not have any such officer for the Ministry following which Agrawal approached CIC seeking redressal of his complaint.

Chief Information Commissioner Satyananda Mishra ordered, "We have something called a Ministry of Finance with a Finance Secretary in position. Therefore it is rather odd that the Ministry does not itself have a CPIO. Even if it is admitted that the Ministry operates through various departments under it, the Ministry itself is in existence as a public authority and, therefore, it needs to have a CPIO."

Aggrieved with the order, the Ministry approached High Court with a plea that order should be set aside because in case order is complied with all the RTI applications of all the departments would come to one point making it practically inexpedient for the concerned CPIO to handle them.

"The difficulties that would arise inter alia are that the concerned CPIO would not be aware of all the subject matters which come under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance, the concerned CPIO would anyway have to consult the officers of the department to which the query pertains for information in order to address the query effectively and this would be a time consuming process that would render the mechanism of getting prompt responses as envisaged under the Act infructuous," the ministry said in its plea.

Urging the Ministry to withdraw the plea in larger public interest, applicant Agrawal said at a time when different departments of various ministries are themselves confused about division of subjects, it is very difficult for public to direct their queries to the precise department, necessitating appointment of a nodal CPIO each in all ministries.

"It is observed that many a times RTI petitions are shuttled between different departments of the same ministry in a bid to avoid responsibility for responding to RTI petitions. Rather appointing a nodal CPIO in all ministries will largely reduce work load by avoiding misuse of section 6(3) of RTI Act for transferring petitions to each-other department in the same ministry," he claimed.