By IANS,
New Delhi : The government is ready to provide an audio recording of the meetings of the joint drafting committee, comprising five ministers and five civil society representatives, on the Lokpal bill, a Right to Information (RTI) query has revealed.
The move comes as a departure from the government’s earlier stand of not putting the deliberations in the public domain.
“The audio recordings of the meetings of the joint drafting committee for drafting the Lokpal bill have now become available with the undersigned. There are nine CDs and you may deposit copying fee of Rs.450 so that copies of the CDs can be supplied to you,” Amarjit Singh, an under secretary in the department of personnel and training, said in an RTI reply to activist Subhash Agarwal.
In an earlier answer, the department had said that they required the law ministry’s sanction to make public audio recordings of the meetings between the government and the Anna Hazare team.
The joint drafting committee had Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee as chairman and civil society leader Shanti Bhushan as co-chairman.
Agarwal told IANS that the earlier reply said that the matter relating to RTI queries on audio recordings had been referred to the legal affairs department in the law and justice ministry for clarifications.