Complaint

1. Nizamuddin r/o erstwhile Moolchand, N Delhi-02

2. Harphool Singh r/o erstwhile Belagaon, N Delhi-02

3. Rajinder Singh r/o Rangpuri Pahari Malakpur Kohi, N Delhi-37

4. Gita Dewan Verma, Planner

through Gita Dewan Verma        ... Complainants

v e r s u s

1. Directorate of Estates, through its Director, Nirman Bhawan, N Delhi-11

2. Ministry of Urban Development, through its Secretary, Nirman Bhawan, N Delhi-11

The Complainants respectfully submit that:-

1. This Complaint is against violation of section 4 of RTI ACT by the Directorate of Estates ("DOE") of the Ministry of Urban Development ("MoUD") in terms of not making accessible for meaningful use the information contained in its computerized records concerning Government accommodations. The information is required urgently as, despite numerous Complaints and 2nd Appeals submitted in this Hon'ble Commission, various authorities have not furnished information concerning housing entitlements and matters have not been heard. Complainants 1 & 2 had sought from DDA, another authority under MoUD, information about lawful re-housing. Their settlements were demolished during 18 & 26 April and they have been / are being compelled to relocate to an illegal scheme where deaths, including of small children, had occurred due to poor sanitation and non-availability of medical care and were not investigated despite Central Vigilance Commission's reference. Deaths, including of children, continue to occur also by drowning in a watercourse along the extended re-settlement site. Complainant 3 had sought information also from MoUD about its policies to promote illegal builder re-housing instead of enforcing statutory housing provisions and has been compelled, in pendency of his 2nd Appeal, to move court against auction of District Park in ground water critical zone for builder re-housing. Complainant 4, a qualified planner, has also submitted a number of related Complaints and 2nd Appeals. All complainants have raised in their various matters also the issue of misuse of judicial process by NGO / political persons to undermine settled entitlements / solutions. A specific instance set out in Complaint dt 27.01.06 of complainant 1 has now led to Supreme Court reportedly rejecting entitlements of the poor altogether. As illegal housing / re-housing projects being advanced by, inter alia, suppressing / obfuscating information about housing / re-housing entitlements are being justified in name also of a Mission announced by Prime Minister's Office ("PMO") in November 2005, information was sought from PMO, which transferred the request to MoUD. Meanwhile, a Bill consonant with the Mission has been passed, but not published on MoUD website, in pendency of the Complainants' matters. The instant Complaint arises from the attempt made in these emergent circumstances by complainants 1, 2 and 3, assisted by complainant 4, to ascertain options for accommodation for at least government employees in their communities. These attempts revealed that even that information is not meaningfully accessible. It is apprehended that more persons will be willfully evicted for willful projects and denied their housing entitlements to be driven to illegal sub-standard re-housing in builder flats or in places where people, including children, have been dying. It is prayed that the instant Complaint, along with aforesaid pending matters be taken up at the earliest - as was done in the Complaint of Ms. Aruna Roy and Mr. Shekhar Singh.

2 The Directorate of Estates ("DOE") primarily deals with the Government Residential Allocation Pool ("GRAP") for persons entitled to government accommodation. GRAP information is computerized, using a system described by DOE as Government Accommodation Management System ("GAMS"). The grievance of the Complainants is that the information contained in GAMS is not accessible over the Internet in meaningfully usable manner and some of what is made available is outdated or false.

3. The GAMS database apparently contains detailed records of all Government accommodations and details of Government employees eligible for accommodation. The information therein includes that of Waiting list, Discretionary Allotments, etc. The database can presumably be queried / searched with various user access privilege levels, the lowest of which is over the Internet, where some individual information can be accessed and certain cross-tables and lists concerning Allotments and Vacancies can be viewed. As set out next, much of this information is not in real-time, but static and inconsistent with the actual database.

4. The information central to GAMS concerns Waiting List and Vacancies. As per its website ("Housing Scenario" page), DOE has 63,745 residential units in Delhi against Demand (on restricted application basis, as of 01.01.2000) of 112,904 - ie, overall shortage of at least 43%. It is submitted that in such a situation, undue advantage can be gained from non-transparency / advance information concerning Waiting Lists and Vacancies and a recent CNN-IBN investigation into servant-quarters' allotments indicated an organized racket thriving on such advance information. In this context it is significant that on DOE website "Waiting List" link has been disabled and the only accessible information concerning Vacancies is in form of cross-tables indicating numbers of vacant units, locality-wise, in each Type. These showed (on 12.05.06) 381 Type-1&1S, 317 Type-2&2H, 341 Type-3, 39 Type-4, 35 Type-5A, 14 Type-5B, 29 Type-5L, 27 Type-6A, 27 Type-6B, 11 Type-7, etc, vacancies. This information is not verifiable by the available searches and appears outdated or false. In particular:

 
a) Lists of Vacant units are not viewable. The only list available is not from the database, but in 'new' notice dt 8.3.06 inviting applications for 4 flats of Type-5A (Vacancies table for which shows 35). The anomaly is depicted in Annexure-1.

 
b) That the tables are not in real-time / generated from database is apparent in case of Allotments. For instance, Type-wise tables indicating allotments made month-wise during June 2005 and May 2006 in 3 categories (viz, 'Regular', 'Change' and 'Other') show 6002 Type-1, 121 Type-1S, 11674 Type-2, 81 Type-2H, 6442 Type-3, 3846 Type-4, 540 Type-4S, 652 Type-5A, 322 Type-5B, 361 Type-6A, 13 Type-6B, 2 Type-7, 2 Type-8 allotments - all in category 'Other'. However, in the viewable month-wise lists the 'category' field contains for numerous records also 'Regular' and 'Change'. This anomaly is illustrated in Annexure-2 & 3.

 
c) The tables for Vacancies are locality-wise and type-wise, but indicate neither all localities nor all existing stock. Lists of localities are available not as data but in pop-up menu of options for viewing lists of type-wise allotments. For Type-7, for instance, pop-up menu shows 30 and Vacancies' table 7 localities. 'Housing Scenario' page indicates total of 88 Type-7 units in Delhi, but it is not possible to view a list of all 88 on any parameter / database field. This is significant in context of rampant unauthorized occupancy / subletting, wherein Vacancy reduces to static and inadequate indicator of availability. As per DOE website ('About Us') in 2004 DOE evicted 225 unauthorized occupants and cancelled 213 allotments for sub-letting. Details of, say, cases under eviction / cancellation notices are of as much interest to accommodation seekers as units actually vacant. Conversely, non-transparency aids continuation of unauthorized occupancy / sub-letting.

 
e) Rules permit sub-letting / sharing with DOE permission, but no information concerning this possibility is accessible over the Internet. Similarly, discretionary allotments are permitted on "medical, security, functional and on extreme compassionate grounds", but no information of precedent cases of especially functional and compassionate grounds is accessible. It is submitted that the Complainants were looking for information also of options of Servant Quarters / Garages available for sub-letting and for precedent cases of compassionate grounds related to demolitions. Nearly no GAMS data on Servant Quarters / Garages is accessible and while the category field in some records in the viewable lists contains "AACC.(DEMOLITION)", it is not clear what exactly this means. Part of a list with such records is illustrated at Annexure-4.

 
f) The categorization of all Allotments in Type-wise tables for June 2005 to May 2006 in category 'Other' than 'Regular' or 'Change' is especially curious. The month-wise allotment lists show that the 'other' categories are, in higher Types, primarily 'INITIAL' (in all records for Types 6B, 7 and 8, nearly all records for Type-6A not showing 'REGULAR' or 'CHANGE', most records for Type-5B not showing 'CHANGE', etc). In Type-6A there are also ten cases of 'STATE GOVT' and 'MEDICAL' and 'FUNCTIONAL' allotments. From Type-5B down more 'other' allotment categories like 'CHANGE RECONSIDER' and 'REGULAR RECONSIDER' start appearing and there seem to be no 'REGULAR' allotments. In Types 1 & 2 the range of other categories is vast - eg, AACC.(DEMOLITION), AACC.(DEMOLITION)R, AACC.(DP.QTR.), AACC.(RET/DEATH), AACC.(RET/DEATH)R, AACC.(UNSAFE), AACC.(UNSAFE)R, ADHOC CHANGE, ALT.ACCOMMODATION, CHANGE RECONSIDER, FUNCTIONAL, FUNCTIONAL R, INITIAL, MARRIAGE, MEDICAL, MEDICAL R, REGL.(DEATH), REGL.(RETIREMENT), REGULAR RECONSIDER. These nomenclatures are not explained even as they suggest that ad-hoc practices are being followed at a large scale in allotments of especially lower Types of accommodation. It is pertinent that, as per the DOE website ('Housing Scenario' page) lower Types account for most of the accommodation stock, with 39,691 units in Types 1 & 2 and 60,999 units in Types 1 to 4 and only 3,336 units in higher Types. 

5. Government employees entitled to accommodation - especially in lower Types - are being greatly disadvantaged by GAMS database information not being made meaningfully accessible. Public at large is also affected by the consequences of non-transparency in terms of both housing supply distortions and corrupt / corruption-prone practices. Rectification of this situation is an imperative of RTI ACT.

P R A Y E R

6. The Complainants respectfully pray to this Hon'ble Commission to direct the Directorate of Estates and its nodal Ministry of Urban Development to forthwith upgrade the level of access to information contained in the GAMS database that is available over the Internet to a level compliant with RTI ACT. It is also prayed that this Complaint be taken up urgently, along with the related Complaints and 2nd Appeals of the Complainants.

G R O U N D S

The Complainants rely on the following among other grounds:

A. Because records already computerized, such as GAMS database, are liable to made accessible over Internet under s. 4(1)(a) of RTI ACT ("Every Public Authority shall... ensure that all records that are ap

propriate to be computerised are... computerised and connected through a network all over the country on different systems..")

B. Because, further, the computerized records are liable to be so made accessible "so that access to such records is facilitated", ie, the GAMS database need to be made accessible not in any static manner, but for querying, with query builder interface, database design in diagrammatic form (eg UML or SQL), etc;

C. Because "details in respect of the information, available to or held by it, reduced in an electronic form" are also liable to be disclosed by DOE under s.4(1)(b)(xiv) of RTI ACT, in violation of which not even database design, the number of ways in which it can be queried, etc, has been disclosed;

D. Because information contained in the GAMS database includes decisions concerning allotments that affect Government employees directly as well as public at large indirectly, and relevant facts of and reasons for these decisions are liable to be disclosed under s.4(1)(c) and s.4(1)(d) of the RTI ACT. An efficient way of doing so would be to allow necessary level of querying of GAMS database over the Internet;

E. Because making information contained in GAMS database meaningfully accessible over Internet is in line with s.4(3) ("For the purposes of sub-section (1), every information shall be disseminated widely and in such form and manner which is easily accessible to the public") and s.4(4) ("...information should be easily accessible, to the extent possible in electronic format...") of the ACT;

F. Because DOE and MoUD, having chosen to invest public money in ORACLE based rather than open-source system, are expected to take requisite additional measures to ensure compliance with RTI ACT. It is submitted that as this Hon'ble Commission, as per minutes of meeting held on 30.03.06, is considering ORACLE for its database, these aspects could be inquired into by treating the GAMS database as test case;

G. Because the level of access to information that is at present available over the Internet does not even remotely attain the levels of transparency that are possible and, thereby, represents underutilization of public investment in GAMS, including for meeting the objectives of RTI ACT;

H. Because Government employees in the communities of Complainants 1 to 3 have been greatly disadvantaged by failure of DOE to make proactive disclosure under s.4 of RTI ACT to make publicly accessible in a meaningful way the information contained in the GAMS database, ie information intrinsically connected to enabling them to avail entitlements to Government accommodation. It is pertinent that their communities as a whole are disadvantaged by the failure of other authorities of the MoUD to implement legal schemes for housing entitlements in accordance with the Master Plan.  As a consequence of these failures, they face options only of illegal re-housing, at times so grossly sub-standard as to be fatal. They face, therefore, not only hardship but also risk of deaths, including of children.

Complainant 4 is authorized representative of Complainants 1 & 2 in their 2nd Appeals submitted to the Commission and co-petitioner in the writ petition (CWP 6824-25/2006, Rajinder Singh & Anr v/s UOI & Ors) that Complainant 3 had to file in pendency of his 2nd Appeal and is making this urgent Complaint on behalf of Complainants 1, 2 & 3 with their concurrence besides on her own behalf.

COMPLAINANTS

14 May 2006