Economic Times: New Delhi: Monday, June 22, 2015.
Retired
bureaucrats never retire. Stumped? A look at the information commissions, the
transparency watchdogs, all over India reveals that they have become a
re-employment arena for bureaucrats.
Even though
the Supreme Court has advised looking beyond retired civil servants for posts
of information commissioners and chief information commissioners, governments
prefer retired bureaucrats over candidates with specialisations in other
fields.
An annual
study by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, exclusively accessed by ET,
reveals 25 of the 29 information commissions, including the Central Information
Commission, are headed by retired civil servants. Information commissions in
Goa, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand are without chiefs. The study found that
76 per cent of the chief information commissioners across are retired IAS
officers it was 69 per cent in 2014 and 74 per cent in 2012.
The
proportion is lower for information commissioners assisting the chief. The
study found that 35 of the 87 commissioners (42.5 per cent) are retired civil
servants from all India services or state civil services. This compares with 50
per cent in 2014 and 53 per cent in 2012.
CHRI's
programme coordinator Venkatesh Nayak sees this trend as a complete violation
of the Supreme Court's advice in the 2013 Union of India vs Namit Sharma
judgement.
"This
tendency indicates the governments are interested in controlling the
information commissions through the bureaucracy to ensure that a degree of
conservatism colours the approach of the information commissioners while
deciding appeals and complaints. Unfortunately, information commissions are
becoming extensions of the government itself," said Nayak.
Even as India
completed a decade of implementation of the RTI Act on June 20, the study
pointed how the RTI machinery is gradually crumbling in the states. The number
of vacancies in state information commissions has increased over the past year
and the pendency of cases is spiralling. The study, conducted by CHRI team
comprising Nayak, Seema Choudhary, Saine Paul, Rupa Bhattacharya and Varun
Chopra, says 20 per cent of the posts at information commissions are vacant
compared with 14.6 per cent in 2014.
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