Times of India: Mumbai: Monday, 07 July 2014.
The aam
aadmi's favourite law, the Right to Information Act, turns nine this year.
Information commissions were set up to decide on complaints and appeals filed
by people against government authorities for blocking access to information.
How have they performed?
At present,
over 66,000 complaints and appeals are pending at six information commissions.
Maharashtra
tops the list with 34,158, followed by the Central Information Commission (CIC;
Delhi). Kerala, Punjab, Uttarakhand and Jammu & Kashmir are next. The
states are the only ones to provide pendency figures besides Sikkim and
Tripura, which showed no pendency.
The findings
are by the non-profit Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI). The data
raises questions about the composition of the commissions.
While much
has been said about the need for more women in parliament, their representation
in the commissions is abysmal. Goa is the only state whose commission is headed
by a woman.
A woman
information commissioner in Tripura is serving as the acting chief information
commissioner. Only 11 of 93 information commissioners in India were women as of
May 2014.
Ironically,
there are transparency issues as well.
A former
director of the Intelligence Bureau now heads the CIC, the country's apex decision
making body on RTI appeals. IB is one of the few organizations exempt from
providing information under RTI, except in cases of corruption and human rights
violation.
"The
problem with a former IB director heading the CIC is that such an individual
has no experience of embedding transparency in administration. The RTI is
path-breaking because it aims to replace a regime of secrecy with one of
transparency. But IB has deliberately been kept out of RTI purview. Will a
person with a background in IB be adequately able to champion
transparency?" asks RTI activist Venkatesh Nayak, who headed the CHRI
research on information commissions.
That the vast
majority of information commissioners are retired civil servants raises fears
of the information commissions turning into a geriatric bureaucratic ward; 69%
of CICs are retired IAS officers. In 2013, the Supreme Court directed
governments to identify candidates other than retired civil servants as
information commissioners.
The Supreme
Court has also asked governments to identify candidates for the post of
information commissioner, with expertise in the fields mentioned in the RTI
Act, which includes law, science and technology, social service, management,
journalism, mass media, and administration and governance.
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