The Wire: New Delhi: Tuesday, November 07, 2023.
Heeralal Samariya was 'elevated' as chief information commissioner. But the terms of the two other members of the Central Information Commission are set to expire on Monday.
To prevent the Central Information Commission from becoming defunct, the Union government has appointed Heeralal Samariya as the chief information commissioner (CIC). The post had been vacant since Yashvardhan Kumar Sinha retired on October 3.
On Monday, November 6, President Droupadi Murmu elevated Samariya, who has been an information commissioner since November 7, 2020, as the chief information commissioner. His term as information commissioner was set to expire on Tuesday.
However, the former secretary at the Ministry of Labour and Employment will now continue as the CIC until September 13, 2025, one day before he turns 65. The terms of the two information commissioners – Saroj Punhani and Uday Mahurkar – will end today. On Monday, the Central Information Commission will have a strength of one CIC and two information commissioners, as opposed to the full strength of a chief and 10 information commissioners.
Reports suggest that Anandi Ramalingam, a former CMD of Bharat Electronics Limited, and V.K. Tiwari, a 1986 batch Indian Forest Service, will also be sworn in as information commissioners by President Murmu on Monday.
If that does not happen, there will not be any information commissioners in the Central Information Commissioner. On October 30, hearing a petition, the Supreme Court had lamented that pending vacancies in information commissions could make the Right to Information (RTI) Act ‘a dead letter’. The apex court had asked the Union and state governments to fill up the posts of information commissioners.
While the Union government has elevated Samariya to the post of CIC, it is yet to act on filling up the vacancy of eight information commissioners.
The three-judge SC bench led by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud had also directed the Department of Personnel to collate information from all states about the sanctioned posts of information commissioners in state information commissions (SICs), how many such posts have been lying vacant and cases pending in each SIC.
Senior advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the petitioner Anjali Bharadwaj, had apprised the bench that despite the SC’s 2019 judgment, vacancies had not been filled up by the states, leading to a piling up of pending cases.
RTI activist Lokesh Batra revealed in August that the Union government has not made any appointments in eight months to the Central Information Commission despite receiving 256 applications.
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