Prof. Arun Mohanty, Editor Orissa Review in the Dept. of Information and Public Relations, Orissa clarified that their Working Paper on the Draft Bill didn't intend to impose two kinds of fees, namely access fee and process fee to be paid by an applicant for information, contrary to the misconception held so far by some persons. In fact, only one fee would be charged against the applicant and that too, just to cover the cost of photocopying or of production of the document.
Prof. Mohanty further clarified that the provision in the Draft Bill for charging different fees depending on the kind of use, personal or commercial of the information sought, was discussed in the Consultation held by CARE and the recommendation was to charge only one uniform fee for everybody, to be fixed on the basis of the cost of photocopying or production of the document. Their Department have taken note of this recommendation.
Most of the speakers wanted the amount of fees to be charged as minimal as possible, just to cover the cost of photocopying or production. And moreover, the fee should be uniformly applicable to everybody irrespective of the purposes for which the information shall be used.