Economic Times: New Delhi: Monday, July 09, 2018.
Saddled with
vacant posts and increasing number of Right to Information (RTI) cases, the
Central Information Commission (CIC) has sent an SOS to the government –
appoint information commissioners at the earliest or there will be just three left
this November.
For the first
time since the RTI Act came into place in India in October 2005, the
transparency watchdog has escalated the matter of increasing vacancies to the
department of personnel and training (DoPT), the nodal ministry for implementation
of the Act.
Documents
accessed by ET under the RTI Act have revealed that the Commission has written
to the DoPT secretary flagging that over the last 18 months, between December
2016 and June 2018, four information commissioners have retired, leaving the
working strength at CIC to just seven, including one chief information
commissioner. Despite advertising for the vacant posts and calling for
applications in advance, none of the posts have been filled by the government
yet.
What could
hit the Commission’s functioning more is the fact that four more information
commissioners would retire within 10 days in November this year.
Information
commissioners Yashovardhan Azad and M Sridhar Acharyulu would retire on
November 21, chief information commissioner R K Mathur on November 24 and
Amitava Bhattacharya on December 1. If no appointments are made, this would
leave CIC with just three commissioners, against a sanctioned strength of 11. It
would have no chief. According to sources, the issue has even been escalated to
the Prime Minister’s Office.
What has
crippled the Commission’s working more is the absence of a secretary.
Commission’s
secretary Anjali Anand Srivastava was posted out and relieved of her duties on
April 2. For the last three months, there has been no secretary. The Commission
has written a letter to P K Tripathi, secretary to appointments committee of
Cabinet and establishment officer.
The
correspondence accessed under RTI Act says, “Post of secretary, CIC is
essential for smooth administrative functioning of the Commission. In view of
the above, it is again requested to take up the matter of appointment of
secretary to the CIC expeditiously”.
The vacancies
have come up at a time when CIC is trying to reduce the waiting time for RTI
However, at
present, the Commission has almost cleared the backlog till June 2017. A senior
CIC official, who asked not to be identified, told ET, “The wait is reduced to
about a year but it would reduce further to 10 months by next month”. The number
of pending cases has come down from an all-time high of 34,000 to 24,060 this
month.