Hindustan Times: New Delhi: Thursday, February 25, 2016.
The NDA
government appointed three retired civil servants as information commissioners
on Wednesday, making it the first time that the transparency watchdog will have
the full complement of the chief and 10 information commissioners.
This will
also be the first time that all the information commissioners except a law
professor are from the government or the public sector.
An official
announcement on Thursday named former IAS officers, Bimal Julka and Amitava
Bhattacharyya and a retired IPS officer Divya Prakash Sinha. Julka had retired
as information & broadcasting secretary, Bhattacharyya was chairman of the
Staff Selection Commission and Sinha, a counter-terror veteran was secretary
(security) at the Cabinet Secretariat.
The three
information commissioners will hold the posts till they turn 65.
Right from
2005 when the commission was set up under the right to information law, the CIC
has lived with vacancies as part of an unwritten, and unspoken strategy within
the civil service to bring about a situation where the panel was overburdened.
“This ensured
that appeals over a period of time take a long time to be heard... reducing the
commission’s effectiveness, and nuisance value,” a government officer who was
closely associated with the appointment process in the past told Hindustan
Times.
The vacancy
also gave the government elbow room to accommodate an influential official
after retirement.
For instance,
the CIC had started out with five commissioners in 2005. By 2008, it had eight.
In 2011, there were as few as five and in 2012, there were only seven of them.
But the
credit for this record does not entirely go to the government; it was RTI
activists such as Lokesh Batra and RK Jain, who had moved the court against the
vacancies. At its last hearing, the court gave the government six weeks to
complete the selection process.
Last week’s
meeting of the selection committee that rejected Delhi Police Commissioner Bhim
Sain Bassi’s claim was timed to enable the government to comply with the apex
court’s deadline that ends this week.
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