Indian Express: Pune: Tuesday,
March 04, 2014.
The state
government has finally made appointments on three posts of information
commissioners in Maharashtra, which were lying vacant for more than one and
half years.
Of the total
seven posts of information commissioners, four did not have full-time heads,
causing pendency of around 27,000 second appeals across different SIC benches
in Maharashtra, including close to 7,000 at Pune bench. Ajit Kumar Jain, former
Additional Chief Secretary; Ravindra Jadhav, former Secretary of ex-President
Pratibha Patil; and Thanksy Thekkekara, former Additional Chief Secretary have
been named as new information commissioners.
Jain bid
goodbye to government service on February 28, while other two senior
bureaucrats retired from government service only recently. The Maharashtra
Chief Information Commissioner Ratnakar Gaikwad administered the oath to the
newly appointed commissioners at a formal function held in Mumbai on Monday.
The fourth
appointment of Vasant Patil, executive engineer of Tapi Irrigation Development
Corporation, has also been made but he did not take oath on Monday as the
tenure of his current post is scheduled to end by March. Newsline had recently
highlighted how the pendency of second appeals made under the RTI Act has been
mounting at various benches of State Information Commission (SIC) due to the
vacuum at top.
Responding to
Newsline query about the time frame required for due appointments, the Chief
Minister’s Office had on February 5 asked the General Administration Department
(GAD) to take necessary steps. However, these appointments have not gone down
well with RTI activists. RTI activist Vijay Kumbhar slammed the latest appointments.
“As per the RTI Act, the Chief Information Commissioner and information
commissioners shall be persons of eminence in public life with wide knowledge
and experience in law, science and technology, social service, management,
journalism, mass media or administration and governance. The Act nowhere says
that only retired top bureaucrats be appointed on these key posts. The RTI
community has serious doubts over the rationale behind these appointments,” he
said.
It is
noteworthy that except senior journalist Vijay Kuvalekar, who was information
commissioner of Pune bench for a term of five years till February 2012 and also
served as acting Chief Information Commissioner of Maharashtra for some time,
the state government has appointed only retired bureaucrats on SIC benches.
Another RTI
activist Vivek Velankar said the four latest appointments are purely
bureaucratic in nature and could be considered as post-retirement benefit for
the top babus. “Such appointments are detrimental to the RTI Act. None of the
newly appointed information commissioners have any exposure to the RTI Act, but
now they will be judges of the transparency law.
The
government does not want any other experts on SIC benches due to its own vested
interests,” he said. RTI activists, however, also said the government has
offered something better than nothing by making fresh appointments before the
model code of conduct for forthcoming elections kicks in.
.JPG)
.JPG)
