New Delhi, Jan 27 (PTI): The Central Information Commission has chided the office of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for “not applying its mind” before forwarding the petition of a senior citizen to a department that in turn sent it on a journey across 28 more departments.

The Commission said it finds it “pathetic” that a high office such as the Chief Minister’s Office has the unhealthy habit of forwarding applications under the Right to Information Act.

The CIC has directed the CMO to furnish a white paper on the status of all kinds of pensions in Delhi Government, reasons for non-payment, time of payment of arrears and time of resumption of payment of pension etc. within 20 days.

Information Commissioner Sridhar Acharyulu also directed the CMO to pay a compensation of Rs 1 lakh to applicant Charanjeet Singh Bhatia and initiate action against all the Public Information Officers (PIOs) who “unnecessarily” transferred the application to others.

”CMO has not applied its mind to the serious issue raised by the appellant and acted like a post office by simply forwarding his RTI application to other departments, who in turn, went on transferring to other departments,” he said.

He said the CMO and other officers are not ready to inform the appellant why they are not paying the pension or when they can start paying the pension.

Bhatia had filed an RTI application to find out why his differently-abled wife did not get her pension for 10 months from July 2014.

Later, cheques for April, May and June 2014 were were delivered to him in February 2015. Bhatia claimed to have sent several letters to the chief minister about lack of budgetary allocations because of which his wife was not getting handicapped pension.

The CMO informed him that his RTI application was sent to PIOs of four departments and asked him to approach them directly.

Each department told the applicant that his petition had been forwarded, but not one of them gave the reply Bhatia had sought.

”The CMO should have replied (to) the appellant that they are not in a position to release the funds and they cannot pay pension. Instead they have transferred to various departments without disclosure of information,” he said.

Acharyulu directed that the CMO should recover Rs 100 from each of PIOs involved in the process and deposit it in CM Welfare Fund.