Akansha Upadhyay
Published on: 25 November 2022 at 20:27 IST
The Supreme Court has launched an online link for applications under the Right to Information (RTI) Act on its website. Announcing the decision in open court, Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud said, “The RTI portal is ready and will start working in 15 minutes.”
Minutes later, a press release stated that the link was active. The Supreme Court on Tuesday activated the link and did a test run. On November 11, the court said it would introduce online filing of RTI applications and first appeals, which were earlier required to be submitted physically to the Chief Public Information Officer.
The announcement was made when the court was hearing a PIL by law students Aakriti Agarwal and Lakshya Purohit seeking a mechanism to file online RTI applications in the court.
“If there is any problem, you can get back to me. I will be more than happy to look into it,” said CJI Chandrachud, who is also the chairman of the e-committee of the Supreme Court.
The facility of filing online RTI application is open only to Indian citizens. Applications can be uploaded by paying a fee of ₹10. Online payment gateway has been made available on the portal for making the payment. The e-Committee has also started the facility for the visually challenged to access the judgments of the Court.
The CJI said the committee is working on providing more facilities for visually impaired persons and allowing equal access to documents filed digitally in the court.
Justices Hima Kohli and JB Pardiwala, who were also part of the CJI-led bench, asked Senior Advocate SK Roongta how he accesses compilations submitted by other lawyers. Roongta, who is blind, said, “I take it on a pen drive and use it on my computer which has Braille output.”
The court asked Roongta to approach the principal scientist of the National Informatics Center to provide a compatible software to convert the content into Braille.