Daily Bhaskar: Ahmedabad:
Wednesday, April 03, 2013.
The Gujarat
government has sought further extension for the appointment of two more
additional information commissioners (AICs) under the Right to Information Act
(RTI). The government has not made the appointments despite last year’s order
of the Gujarat High Court (HC).
The
government recently sought more time to fill up the posts, while referring to
an apex court order that made it mandatory to fill the posts with judicial
members only. The government has been waiting as a review petition had been
filed against the order. An HC bench, on August 14 last year, asked the
government to appoint two more AICs, in addition to chief information
commissioner (CIC) and two AICs. The directive came after a Vadodara-based
senior citizen, Praful Desai, filed a PIL exposing the fact that almost 10,000
applications were pending before CIC.
Desai has
been fighting for appointment of information commissioners since 2011. A
petition was filed by slain RTI activist Amit Jethva in 2009. “After the order
of the court in Jethva’s petition, the government had appointed two AICs but a
backlog of 8,000 cases was created in 2011,” said Desai.
“I later filed
a PIL in 2011 to appoint more commissioners to ease the backlog as according to
RTI Act, the government can appoint up to ten commissioners. But the court did
not accede to my plea and asked me to wait for four months for the backlog to
ease,” said Desai. “I again had to file a PIL in 2012 as the backlog piled up
to 10,000 cases and the court ordered the appointment of two more AICs. Now,
the government is asking repeated extensions and is not filling up the posts,”
he added.
“I have filed
an affidavit before the court that the government’s demand to wait till the
outcome of the Supreme Court petition should not be accepted and make the order
by using judicial wisdom. The government’s stand is frustrating the cause of
the Act,” argued the petitioner.
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