Secret GOs: HC wants answers by Feb 28

Hyderabad: Wondering why the state is shying away from filing its counter in a public interest litigation (PIL) which questioned the attitude of the government in keeping almost half of its government orders (GOs) away from public gaze and the huge number of secret GOs that are not accessible to the citizens, the Telangana high court on Monday directed the Telangana government to file its counter by February 28.
A bench of Chief Justice Raghavendra Singh Chauhan and Justice A Abhishek Reddy gave this direction while hearing the PIL filed by BJP activist Perala Sekhar Rao, questioning the state’s action in not keeping all GOs in public domain.
“The state is allowed to keep certain sensitive orders away from the public domain, but all GOs cannot be brought under this category,” the petitioner said. Of the nearly a lakh GOs the state had issued between June, 2014, and August, 2019, as many as 42,000 GOs were marked ‘secret’ and made inaccessible to the public, he said. All important GOs should be uploaded on the state website and an officer has to be appointed to see that these GOs were properly uploaded and the state website properly maintained, he said. The bench too questioned the state counsel as to why the government did not file its counter though a direction was given to do so in September 2019 itself.