Sec 498A IPC
Central Public Information Officer, Ministry of Home Affairs, North Block, New Delhi – 110001
With reference to Sec 498A Indian Penal Code from the time this section came into force, kindly provide yearwise district-wise India figures for:
1. Number of complaints filed, with police or any agency with police dept links, under this section, and how many of these were converted into FIRs.
2. Number of FIRs under this section, and how many resulted in convictions at trial court, High Court and Supreme Court stages.
3. Number of police personnel against whom departmental or criminal action has been taken where FIRs under this section found false.
Q4. Has the Government of India made efforts to counter the travel advisory by the US and other countries to their citizens citing this illogical law, and citing Indian Supreme Court’s observation calling this law as “Legal Terrorism”?
Dear Sir,
Sectin 498A or as its more popularly called as Dowry law came into effect since 1983.
I would ignore the Question 4 from Mr. Dev here, since it has no relation whatsoever to your line of questions for this particular RTI.
Nevertheless, the draft of your RTI Application looks good to me. My only issue here is that amount of information, that you are asking seems to be humongous, (Yearwise/District Wise) ..
My understanding is this is something, that would be too huge of an information, that PIO will find a reason to reject it.
I will move this application to the Drafted Category and will let other experts comment on my concern. Hopefully, my concern is not such a big deal and can be ignored.
Anand
1. Is the applicant aware if such information is compiled as a routine by MHA and the Law ministry. This is particularly for points 1&2.It would help. If not then application would run into the usual road block- information does not exist OR collection beyond resources of public authority.
3. Point 3 seems more practical but why action against police if FIR( complaint) is found false? Police will have no say if a complaint is filed specially since it is a non-bailable offence.
This RTI Application is too voluminous.If “district-wise India figures” are requested from the PIO, we will be flooded with thousands of pages of reply which will be impossible for our team to manage.Most probably the PIO will refuse to give reply on pretext of bulkiness and huge costs incurred on the reply.
Also, we don’t think there there is any threat involved to the applicant’s prestige or security through this RTI Application.
If the applicant is interested in taking this application forward we encourage him/her to take this forward himself/herself.
We are moving this to “Resolved Non-Anonymous RTIs” category.
Is case “resolved”?
The drafting can be in a way so as not to ask for district-wise data.
See the sheer number of RTI’s coming for anonymous filing on this subject. As for anonymity, discretion of RTI Anonymous to decide which application needs anonymity cannot be arbitrary, else such discretion will be illegal. Surely RTI-Anonymous should not cross the boundary of law. To make publicity about sending risky RTI applications anonymously, and then to try to escape providing anonymity to complaints related to criminal conduct of police personnel, would amount to deceiving the public. Whenever we are seeking information about criminal conduct of police personnel, there is life-risk. Lessons can be taken from the way lives were lost of the martyrs whose photos appear on RTI Anonymous homepage. Many were targets of police bullets or harassment. RTI Anonymous needs to take up subject of police reforms proactively.