new delhi a week after the department of personnel and training dopt had said it has sought the law ministrys opinion on making audio tapes of the lokpal joint drafting committee deliberations public under the rti act the ministry is yet to receive any such queryit was only from media reports that we came to know that dopt has sought our opinion regarding disclosure of lokpal deliberations audio recordings however no such file has arrived yet a senior official in the ministry saidrti activist s c agrawal had filed an rti application seeking copies of the audio recording of the deliberations of the lokpal joint drafting committees eight meetings held in may and june the panel which had five representatives each from team anna and the union cabinet was formed after anna hazares fiveday fast in april demanding that the jan lokpal bill be passed in parliament officials had then said that though the minutes of the lokpal joint committee meetings were uploaded on the dopt website they needed to seek legal opinion on whether audio tapes could be made public under the rti actfinance minister pranab mukherjee home minister p chidambaram then law minister veerappa moily telecom and hrd minister kapil sibal and then minority affairs minister salman khurshid represented the union cabinet anna hazare justice n santosh hedge shanti bhushan prashan bhushan and arvind kejriwal were part of team anna who had insisted on making video recordings of the proceedings however the government had agreed to make only audio recordings of the deliberations law ministry officials claimed that dopts query is superfluous as the rti act does not make any distinction on the basis of the form in which the information is stored the law is clear that provided the nature of the information is not such as is specifically exempted if a government department has access to it it should be disclosed it does not make any exceptions based on the form of the information sending such basic queries amounts to creating complications where there are nonethe rti act defines information as any material in any form including records documents memos emails opinions advices press releases circulars orders logbooks contracts reports papers samples models data material held in any electronic form and information relating to any private body which can be accessed by a public authority under any other law for the time being in force