This commission maintains that the Act, 2017 does not provide blanket exemption to any lease agreement signed by a public body with a private party.
This commission holds that merely because certain provision(s) in a lease agreement may contain commercial/private information, it does not mean that a lease agreement can be exempted from disclosure in its entirety.
The Act, 2017 envisages a situation wherein a document, which should be otherwise be made public but its parts may contain exempted information. In such an eventuality, part(s) containing information to be exempted can be severed, or, blanked out from the document as mentioned in Section 16 (1) (i) of the Act, 2017. However, in such a scenario, the public body is required to cite specific reason(s) for invoking the particular exemption clause of the Act, 2017.