EPW: Lucknow: Saturday, December 10, 2016.
All the
central and state information commissioners (CICs and SICs) congregated in New
Delhi in the second week of November to celebrate the 11th year of the
enactment of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005 in a two-day conclave.
During the conclave I found a growing concern among SICs from across the
country on the issue of their pensions.
The
decade-long experience of the RTI Act has not as yet put in place any concrete
plan towards the pensions of SICs. It is perhaps the most pertinent question,
as after the five-year tenure, a CIC or SIC would end up with a pension of
around Rs.6,000-8,000 per month, which amounts to nothing after enjoying powers
equal to the election commissioner (EC). A CIC or SIC would be in no position
to hold any further office, hence, it is the responsibility of the government
to guarantee a dignified sustenance and existence. After all, Parliament has
made persons of “eminence” the selection criteria, which comes after a
“life-long” service towards law, science and technology, social service,
management, journalism, mass media, or administration and governance.
There is a
grave inequality between the pensions of CICs or SICs who are from the civil
services/judiciary or other professional backgrounds, and those from social
service or freelance journalism for instance. Obviously, persons of eminence
from professional backgrounds would have a back-up pension, to be added to
pension accrued from their previous jobs. What about those from only law or
social service or journalism backgrounds?
The
interstate disparity can be gauged, for example, between Karnataka and Uttar
Pradesh. About 3,000 cases are registered anew every month in Uttar Pradesh,
while a retired SIC gets Rs.6,000 as monthly pension, while in Karnataka the
pension is Rs.40,000 per month.
A similar
situation had arisen for pensions of high court judges. Eminent lawyers who
became high court judges directly from the field of practising law were bereft
of any pension as they were not in any earlier service linked with a pension.
This, however, has now changed with the recent amendment to the law in 2016
that presumes every such judge to have 10 years in service, and thus, their
pension will be calculated accordingly. This now puts their pension at par with
judges from the judicial services. CICs and SICs have also been accorded the
status of quasi-judicial bodies in the wake of a Supreme Court order (Namit
Sharma v Union of India, Case No 210 of 2012). The same yardstick deserves to
be applied to CICs and SICs who do not come from pension-linked services.
When a CIC is
equal to an EC, who is equal to a Supreme Court judge, a similar assumption of
10 years’ service can be adopted for information commissioners appointed from a
field of eminence, without having service or pension support. As there is no
separate enactment of salary and other terms of service for the information
commissioners, the inequality is a violation of Articles 14 and 21 of the
Constitution, and can be done away with by promulgating the Rules of Pension
for Information Commissioners at the central level.
Haider Abbas,
Uttar Pradesh State Information Commissioner, Lucknow
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