The Hindu: New Delhi: Saturday, July 28, 2018.
The Supreme
Court on Friday put the government in the dock over long-pending vacancies in
the Central Information Commission and the State Information Commissions,
adjudicatory bodies under the Right to Information Act.
A Bench of
Justices A.K. Sikri and Ashok Bhushan asked the Centre and seven States to file
affidavits with a deadline by which they would fill the vacancies. The
affidavits have to be filed in four weeks.
The court
asked why four positions were still vacant in the CIC despite a government
advertisement in 2016.
Additional
Solicitor-General Pinky Anand said an advertisement for filling the four has
been issued again. Expressing concern over pendency of cases in the SICs, the
Bench asked Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Gujarat, Kerala, Odisha and
Karnataka to respond with a timeline for filling vacancies.
The plea by
the RTI activists Anjali Bhardwaj, Commodore (retired) Lokesh Batra and Amrita
Johri has said that over 23,500 appeals and complaints are pending with the
CIC. The petitioners said the Centre and the State governments had “attempted
to stifle” the RTI Act by failing to appoint commissioners. Advocate Prashant
Bhushan, for Ms. Bhardwaj, submitted that after 2016, the new advertisement was
only published by the government on Friday, just hours before the hearing in
the Supreme Court.
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