State government’s information dissemination system faltering , officers avoid media and contact numbers are not available officially

By Our Correspondent

Agartala, May 30, 2026

The information dissemination and sharing by the government departments with the media is becoming increasingly difficult because of non-availability of contact numbers and reluctance on the part of a section of bureaucracy to communicate with media . This was evident in Ambassa subdivision yesterday as there was a hue and cry over a road accident in which a tripper driver Rahimuddin had been trapped inside his vehicle. A number of journalists tried to contact the SDM and DM office as also police station but that was not possible because of non-availability of contact number. Later of course a section of officials tried to pick holes in the news on the matter on flimsy ground like a section of people had become busy making reels with the driver looking seated helplessly in his broken vehicle. There was no formal statement issued by the district and subdivisional administration on the issue.

Senior media person covering the state over the past more than four decades actively said that earlier the official land telephone numbers of senior officers of all departments were available in the Telephone directorate but the replacement of land phones by mobile sets has created a problem as in most of the cases the mobile numbers given in official websites and portals are found to be either unresponsive or backdated . In many cases junior employees attend the calls made to seniors and authorized office bosses and grill the caller about the purpose behind the call annoyingly and hardly ever forward the call to the seniors after obtaining permission in advance which is also a rarity. The junior cite the ground that the mobile numbers are personal and can not be accessed so easily without the stating the purpose behind the call. There are rare and honourable exceptions but that do not make the rule.

The problem is also worsened by the fact that Tripura government has stopped the practice of publishing the annual government diary in which all basic informations about the state including phone numbers used to be given. Now the mobile numbers given in government website and portals are found to be backdated most of the time and not in use. The worst problem that the media face is the non-availability of regular phone numbers of police stations spread across the state. Whenever a serious incident takes place speaking to the concerned police station becomes necessary for media but the contact number of the OC and even his name has to be collected from the concerned section of the state police headquarter. This not only takes lot of time but very often the number given turns out to be dysfunctional or not in use .

Apart from this, the more serious and concerning thing is that the RTI Act for obtaining official information has virtually become a dead letter . Even when anyone tries to obtain information through RTI the application for this is not entertained and on rare occasions when applications are entertained the dissemination of information takes such an inordinately long time that the applicant becomes frustrated and stops trying to have the information required. A senior journalist said that the entire system of dissemination of information has to be put back in order so that media and common people can easily obtain information required ; otherwise lot of misinformation will continue doing rounds in the state and public will be misled.

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