The Telangana High Court issued notices to the government over a petition regarding the Government Orders (GO) not being made public. The petitioner, Perala Shekar Rao, a resident of LB Nagar, claimed that around 43,462 GOs were missing from the government’s official website.
After hearing the plea, the bench of Chief Justice Raghavendra Singh Chauhan and Justice A Abhishek Reddy, gave four weeks’ time for the General Administration Directorate and Principal Secretary for Revenue to respond.
According to the petitioner, the government had issued as many as 1.04 lakh GOs between June 2, 2014 and August 15, 2019. However, 43,462 GOs were not accessible on the website.
“This veil over public domain is only to hide the actions of the state government that were done more for political interest rather than for reasons related to governance. Not uploading such a huge number of important decisions of the state government is illegal and unconstitutional,” the petitioner said.
The petitioner alleged that the authorities showed promptness in uploading unimportant GOs while the crucial ones were not made public. Citing several GOs related to payment of less than Rs 500 towards mobile phone bill payment of top officers which were posted on the website, the petitioner said that those important to general public were not made available.
Further, the petitioner in his plea, requested the High Court to instruct the government to appoint a senior officer to update its official website.
The petitioner argued that, in 2017, the Telangana government had issued GO M.S. No. 4 making it mandatory for all the departments to update data and information on their respective websites. This was to be done in compliance with the Guidelines of Government of India Websites (GGIW). #KhabarLive