New CIC of India calls on Dr Jitendra

Daily Excelsior: New Delhi: Thursday, 07 January 2016.

Newly appointed Chief Information Commissioner of India R.K.Mathur today formally called on Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER), MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances, Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr Jitendra Singh, after officially joining his new assignment. Pertinent to mention that Mathur was sworn in as CIC of India on 4th of this month at Rashtrapati Bhawan in the presence of President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Mathur is a former bureaucrat with exchequered career and had superannuated as the Defense Secretary of India.He succeeds Vijai Sharma who completed his term as CIC of India last month.

During an interaction lasting over 20 minutes, Dr Jitendra Singh expressed the need to devise methods for expediting the disposal of RTI applications in order to reduce pendency and at the same time, also find out ways to curtail the filing of avoidable RTI applications. He said, during the last one and a half year of the Modi Government, a lot much of information about the working and the decisions taken in different central ministries has already been put on the website and is in public domain, which should also be a consideration while looking at this issue.

Reiterating the Modi Government’s resolve to make governance citizen-centric and at the same time also transparent, Dr Jitendra Singh said, Department of Personnel & Training (DoPT) and Department of Administrative Reforms & Public Grievances (AR&PG) have, in the last few months, introduced several new measures including e-portals to achieve this objective.

Dr Jitendra Singh, while congratulating Mathur for his selection as CIC, wished him a fruitful and productive tenure and assured of full cooperation on behalf of the Department. In turn, Mathur assured the Minister that he will try to perform to the best of his ability and live up to the huge expectation which the nation has from the institution of Central Information Commission.