RTI appelas pendency up 96% in Pune as SIC shuttles between the city and Nashik.

The Indian Express: Pune: Thursday, September 1, 2016

Over the last few months, pendency of second appeals with the Pune bench of the State Information Commissionerate has seen a whopping 96 per cent rise. With 8,294 second appeals pending before it as of July 2016, the Pune bench has the second highest pendency in the state, the first being Amravati SIC bench having 8,340 appeals pending before it.

The SIC benches are practically the last stage of appeals for information seekers under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005. Second appeals are filed after the information seeker has exhausted all efforts to obtain information with government offices. SICs have the power to fine/summon and order for information to be provided to the applicant.

At present, Maharashtra has seven SIC benches. State’s chief information commissioner Ratnakar Gaikwad is based in Mumbai.

Of the seven SIC benches, Nashik, Aurangabad and Amravati are vacant. Nagpur SIC V D Patil has been given the additional charges of Aurangabad and Amravati while Pune SIC Ravindra Jadhav has been entrusted with the additional charge of Nashik SIC. Both the commissioners are now shuttling between cities to hear appeals, which is being cited as one of the major causes of the pendency.

A year back, ie July 2015, when all the SIC benches had full-time information commissioners, pendency was much lower. Records show that by the end of July 2015, the state had just over 3,666 second appeals pending. Back then, Pune bench had just 292 appeals pending, while the benches of Aurangabad, Nagpur and Amravati had 291,152 and 845 pending appeals respectively.

As compared to this, by the end of July 2016, Pune has 8,294 pending appeals while benches of Aurangabad, Nagpur and Amravati have 4,530, 845 and 8,340 appeals pending before them.

At present, the over all pendency in the state is 37,149, by far the highest such number for any July in the last four years.

According to city-based RTI activist Vijay Kumbhar, the pendency was due to several reasons, which included the failure of the government to fill vacant positions in SIC.