On July 19, actor Kamal Haasan issued a public people to the people of TN to flood the state’s ministers with online complaints about instances of corruption. Kamal also provided people with the link to a page on the government website, www.tn.gov.in, which gave the contact details of all the TN Ministers, including their email IDs and office addresses.
Within three days, all of the details disappeared from the website.
Just over two weeks later, the Madras High Court ordered the Tamil Nadu government on Monday to explain why this had occurred.
A division bench of the HC comprising of Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice M Sundar asked the government if the details had disappeared due to a technical error or if there were any other reasons for removing them.
The court gave the state government a time period of two weeks to respond, and posted the case for August 21.
The court was hearing a petition filed by DMK MLA Palanivel Thyagarajan, which challenged the removal of details from the government website as a move against democracy and transparency.
In his petition, MLA Thyagarajan stated that it was illegal to remove the contact information of Ministers, as this is in contravention to the provisions of the Right to Information Act, 2005.
"Such information is official and therefore it will not fall under the category of information exempted from disclosure as per law. Removal of such information is in contravention to the provisions of the Right to Information Act and as such is illegal," the petitioner said, reported The Times of India.
He added that people from his constituency had brought this to his notice, as they were unable to send any information to the ministers.