The
Hindu: New Delhi: Tuesday, 25 November 2014.
The post of
Chief Information Commissioner has been vacant since August 22 when Rajiv
Mathur retired. The Chief Information Commissioner is to be appointed by the
President on the recommendation of a three-member committee headed by the Prime
Minister, that includes the Leader of the Opposition and a Union Cabinet Minister
to be nominated by the Prime Minister.
“All that it
needed was for the meeting to be called and appointment made,” Nikhil Dey of
the National Campaign for the People’s Right To Information said. “The
appointment was not held up by the lack of a Leader of the Opposition, because
the RTI Act clearly states that the leader of the single largest opposition is
also acceptable. If transparency had mattered to the government, they would
have made the appointment a priority,” he said.
Former
Central Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi has long said that rising
pendency is killing the landmark Act. “When I was in the CIC, we decided that
we would dispose of a minimum of 3,200 cases per year. I myself was doing 5,000
cases a year and 6,000 in my last year. Yet this norm is being flouted, and
Information Commissioners are working less and less, and pendency is piling
up,” he said.
Reflecting
recent news developments, there has been a big rise in the number of RTI
appeals against the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Human Resource
Development, the University Grants Commission, the Central Board of Secondary
Education and the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan. Over a third of cases involve
appeals against the Ministry of Defence alone.
.JPG)
.JPG)
