Ex-CJI's income stays under wraps?

Following an objection by former Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan, who is currently the chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, the income tax department has refused to disclose his income in the past five years as sought by an applicant under the Right to Information Act.

The I-T department has rejected an application filed by one T Balachandran of Kochi in this regard. Balachandran had sought from the department certified copies of the income returns of his namesake for five years from 2005. He also wanted to know if any investigation had been conducted against Balakrishnan as regards his income.

The department referred the query to Balakrishnan and sought to know if he had any objections to revealing the information asked for. "In response to the above letter," the department's public information officer in Kochi wrote back to T Balachandran, "former honourable Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan, filed a letter dated 05/02/2011 objecting to disclose the above information stating that disclosure of the information sought for by Dr T Balachandran is one which is exempted from disclosure as per Section 8(j) of the RTI Act 2005."

Section 8(j) states, "Information which relates to personal information the disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or interest, or which would cause unwarranted invasion of the privacy of the individual, are completely exempted from disclosure unless the central public information officer or the state public information officer or the appellate authority, as the case may be, is satisfied that the larger public interest justified the disclosure of such information."

Since T Balachandran had not mentioned "how the disclosure of the information would serve the larger public interest", and considering how certain similar applications had been dealt with by the Central Information Commission, the department was rejecting the application.

D B Binu, president of the RTI Federation of Kerala, said that since Balakrishnan was a Supreme Court judge and CJI, he was a public servant during the period for which income details were sought.

Balakrishnan is still a public servant as he was now the head of the NHRC. Moreover, serious allegations of financial impropriety had been levelled against his close relatives. Because of all these factors, Binu contended, Balakrishnan's income details involved "the larger public interest".