The Hindu: New Delhi: Tuesday, July 03, 2018.
The Supreme
Court on Monday directed the Centre and eight State governments to respond to a
petition highlighting that a large number of vacancies in the Central
Information Commission and the State Information Commissions have crippled the
Right to Information Act and resulted in huge backlog.
A Bench led
by Justice A.K. Sikri issued notice to the Centre and Maharashtra, Kerala,
Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Telangana, Karnataka, Odisha and Gujarat.
Justice Sikri
asked Additional Solicitor-General Pinky Anand why appointments were not made
despite the backlog.
Advocates
Kamini Jaiswal and Pranav Sachdeva, appearing for petitioners Anjali Bhardwaj,
Commodore (retired) Lokesh Batra and Amrita Joshi, argued that the Centre and
the State governments have attempted “to stifle the functioning of the RTI Act
by failing to do their statutory duty of ensuring appointment of commissioners
in the Central Information Commission and State Information Commissions, in a
timely manner”.
The petition
said that due to non-appointment of information commissioners, several
information commissions take many months, and in some cases even years, to
decide on appeals and complaints due to accumulation of pending
appeals/complaints, defeating the entire object of the RTI Act, 2005.
Currently,
there are four vacancies in the Central Information Commission, though more
than 23,500 appeals and complaints are pending.
The Andhra
Pradesh Commission is completely non-functional as not a single information
commissioner has been appointed.
Big
backlog
The
Maharashtra Commission which has a backlog of more than 40,000 appeals and
complaints, has four vacancies.
The Kerala
Commission is functioning with only a single commissioner and has more than
14,000 pending appeals and complaints.
Similarly,
there are six vacancies in the Karnataka Commission even though nearly 33,000
appeals and complaints are pending.
Odisha is
functioning with only three commissioners and Telangana with two commissioners
and their backlogs are more than 10,000 and 15,000 appeals/complaints,
respectively.
The West
Bengal Commission is functioning with only two commissioners and is currently
hearing appeals/complaints filed 10 years ago.
The effective
functioning of information commissioners, the final adjudicators under the RTI
Act, is critical for the health of the transparency regime in the country, the
petition said.