Frontline: New Delhi: Wednesday, 8th October
2025.
Empty posts at the Centre and States have paralyzed the transparency watchdog, while the Personal Data Protection Act weakens citizen access.
The Central Information
Commission (CIC) is once again without a chief the seventh time in the past 11
years that the transparency watchdog has been left headless. Since the
retirement of Chief Information Commissioner Heeralal Samariya on September 14,
2025, the body has been functioning with just two commissioners; nine posts,
including that of the chief, lie vacant.
The impact is already visible with 26,000 appeals and complaints pending. There are applicants who have been waiting for more than a year for their matters to be heard. Activists argue that such delays defeat the very purpose of the Right to Information (RTI) Act.
Commodore Lokesh Batra (retired), a transparency activist, told Frontline that the absence of a chief has brought the CIC to a standstill. “The chief is both adjudicator and administrator. The CIC is supposed to be the guardian of transparency for the people, for the law, not for the government. By not appointing anyone despite being fully aware of their retirement dates, the government is deliberately killing transparency,” he said. The RTI Act has no provision for an acting chief to head the CIC.
For Batra, the RTI Act is an important tool for citizens to participate in governance. “People have a right to know. We have to remember that the government owns nothing. These roads, this big infrastructure, these buildings they are all made with taxpayers’ money. They belong to the people. Even knowledge and information belong to the people. Passion for the country must mean passion to know about the country.”
Samariya was appointed Chief Information Commissioner on November 6, 2023, and retired upon reaching the age of 65. Before he took charge, the post had lain vacant for a month after Y.K. Singh’s retirement. Out of the 12 Chief Information Commissioners who have taken office since the RTI Act came into force in 2005, only 5 assumed charge the day after their predecessors retired. The first time the CIC was left without a chief was in August 2014 when Rajiv Mathur retired.
Although the dates of vacancies were known in advance every retirement being routine, with the incumbent either attaining the age of 65 or completing his/her tenure the government has repeatedly failed to fill the posts on time. This is a direct violation of the Supreme Court’s 2019 judgment, which laid down clear directions to ensure vacancies are filled in a timely manner.
In Anjali Bhardwaj v. Union of India (2019), the court warned that vacancies would “badly affect the functioning of the Act, which may even amount to negating the very purpose for which this Act came into force”.
More recently, in October 2023, the court cautioned that the RTI Act risked becoming a “dead letter” if posts remained unfilled. This is not an isolated lapse. Vacancies have remained unfulfilled since November 2023. Despite advertisements being issued first in August 2024 for the eight Information Commissioner posts, and again in May 2025 for the chief’s position—the government has failed to complete the selection process. In January this year, the Centre told the Supreme Court that appointments would be made by April 2025.
On September 26, 2025, the Supreme Court heard a case on the non-appointment of information commissioners before a bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi. Advocate Prashant Bhushan, arguing for the petitioners, noted that despite earlier directives, vacancies in the Central Information Commission remain unfilled. The commission has only two members, with over 26,800 appeals and complaints pending and hearings delayed by more than a year.
The court was also told that the Jharkhand State Information Commission has been defunct since May 2020, five years and four months. In January 2025, the court had directed the largest opposition party in the Vidhan Sabha to nominate one of its members to the selection committee for appointing a Chief and commissioners. The matter is listed next for October 27, 2025.
In response to an RTI petition filed by Batra in July 2025, the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) confirmed that 83 applications had been received for the post of Chief Information Commissioner in response to the May advertisement. Earlier, in September 2024, another RTI petition revealed that 161 applications had been received after vacancies for Information Commissioners were advertised; yet, no appointments followed. “Since then, there has been more than a year’s delay, and the vacancies are still not filled,” Batra said.
The last round of
appointments, in November 2023, was mired in controversy: they were made
arbitrarily by a selection committee that excluded the Leader of the
Opposition. Under the RTI Act, the selection committee must comprise the Prime
Minister as chairperson, the Leader of the Opposition, and a Cabinet Minister
nominated by the Prime Minister.
For Venkatesh Nayak, RTI activist and director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the CIC remaining headless is part of a troubling pattern. It is, he said, “a clear indication of the lack of importance and primacy given to the implementation of the law. It is part of a general trend we have seen over the years wherein various institutions including statutory bodies and universities are let to languish for months without the vacancies being filled. This is most unfortunate because this government is certainly not short of staff to do this work.”
Nayak stressed that the issue reflects poorly on the Prime Minister himself, since the DoPT, which oversees appointments to the CIC, is part of his portfolio. “The Central Information Commission constitutes the oversight mechanism on transparent governance. And if such a body remains headless and without an adequate number of commissioners, then people’s grievances about lack of transparency or inadequate access to information in relation to their RTI applications will remain unaddressed for months together.” The pendency figures bear this out. “Today, the ordinary wait time is about 8 to 12 months or even longer before the commission,” Nayak noted. “There are more than 25,000 appeals and complaints pending. By the time information is disclosed, it often becomes obsolete.”
India has 28 State Information Commissions (SICs) and 1 CIC. The RTI Act mandates that each commission have 1 Chief Information Commissioner and up to 10 Information Commissioners, depending on the workload. The rot is not confined to the Centre the SICs across the country face the same neglect. “There are States like Jharkhand where there wasn’t a single commissioner as of last year,” Nayak pointed out, citing a study by the Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS).
“In Karnataka and Maharashtra, multiple commissioner posts remain vacant, leaving entire divisions without adjudication. Commissioners are supposed to be based in different parts of the State so that people can have better access to them. But when vacancies don’t get filled up, cases simply go unheard.”
According to the “Report Card of Information Commissions in India 2023-24”, compiled and published by the SNS in January 2025, seven Information Commissions were defunct for varying periods between July 1, 2023, and June 30, 2024, in Jharkhand, Telangana, Goa, Tripura, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh. Four commissions in Jharkhand, Telangana, Tripura, and Goa remained defunct, while five were without a chief in Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Uttarakhand, and Odisha. As of June 30, 2024, more than four lakh appeals and complaints were pending across the 29 commissions.
The report also revealed another irony: although Section 25 of the RTI Act mandates that each commission shall prepare and publish an annual report on the implementation of the Act, 62 per cent of the commissions had not published their 2022-23 reports. “The transparency bodies do not publish data regarding RTIs, making it difficult to even understand the full scale of RTI use in the CIC and SICs,” Nayak observed.
Nayak also explained how the vacancies impact the performance of Information Commissions. Section 20 of the RTI Act empowers Information Commissions to impose fines of up to Rs.25,000 on erring Public Information Officers (PIO). With vacancies piling up, pendency stretches over a year, eroding the threat of penalties against non-compliant officials. “Because commissions have become so slow in disposing of cases, the threat of penalties simply disappears,” Nayak said. “A PIO who ignores an RTI application or refuses information knows his case may not be heard for over a year. By then, he’ll be transferred, and the commission will simply call whoever is in charge. The accountability aspect of RTI implementation vanishes into thin air.”
He added: “When commissions themselves are riddled with vacancies, PIOs know cases won’t come up for months. The seriousness with which they should respond disappears.”
According to the SNS
report, commissions failed to impose penalties in 95 per cent of cases where
they were applicable.
Legislative changes have further weakened the RTI regime. The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, passed in 2023, amended Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act, replacing the earlier public-interest test for disclosure of personal information with a blanket exemption. Several civil rights and journalist bodies had warned that this change could hollow out the RTI Act and undermine press freedom.
The DPDP Act is intended to “provide for the processing of digital personal data in a manner that recognises both the right of individuals to protect their personal data and the need to process such personal data for lawful purposes”. But in doing so, it rewrites one of the most important provisions of the RTI Act.
Section 8(1)(j) earlier stated that personal information could only be withheld if it had no relationship to public interest or would cause unwarranted invasion of privacy, unless the larger public interest justified disclosure. This required PIOs to weigh competing claims of privacy and transparency.
Section 44(3) of the DPDP Act, however, reduced this safeguard to a single line: “information which relates to personal information”. By removing the balance test, the scope for denying information has dramatically widened. “This is hugely problematic, retrograde, and will reduce the efficacy of the RTI Act,” Nayak said. “Now it says any personal information about an individual cannot be disclosed. This destroys anti-corruption efforts and accountability-seeking under RTI.”
The amendment also deleted a critical provision that ensured parity between citizens and legislators: information that could not be denied to Parliament or State legislatures could not be denied to citizens. “That parity between citizens and elected representatives in terms of information access has simply been destroyed,” Nayak argued.
Additionally, the DPDP Act creates a new Data Protection Board, entirely government-appointed, to decide disputes over personal data. “The board will be the final arbiter on personal data issues. Since it is a later and special law, it could override the Information Commissions. The board will be entirely government-appointed, unlike the CIC, which at least involves the Leader of Opposition in appointments. This risks making the RTI Act subordinate to privacy concerns without safeguards for public interest,” Nayak warned.
Already, Nayak says, PIOs in some States have begun citing the DPDP Act to deny disclosures, even though its rules have not yet been notified. “The opacity is intensifying even before the law has been enforced,” he said. “The accountability-seeking aspect of the RTI Act will unfortunately be completely squashed by the implementation of DPDP.”
Wajahat Habibullah, the first Chief Information Commissioner who oversaw the RTI regime in its formative years, says the weakening of the CIC is as much about status as it is about vacancies. “The law has been watered down. The office of the commissioner has been made beholden to the government. Appointments as well as the powers exercised by the Chief Information Commissioner are no longer as free as they were originally guaranteed by the law,” he told Frontline.
Habibullah recalled that when he served as Chief Information Commissioner, the position was on par with the Chief Election Commissioner, well above Chief Cabinet Secretary and equivalent to a Supreme Court Justice. Today, he noted, the Chief Information Commissioner ranks no higher than a Cabinet Secretary, while Information Commissioners are equivalent to Secretaries of the government of India. “You can see how this affects the Commission’s position as defined by government legislation.”
He also highlighted the practical implications of vacancies. “If there is no Chief Information Commissioner, the key appointee, the rulings of the Information Commission are, in fact, invalid. The chief determines the administration of the commission and the distribution of work. Without that leadership, the law is virtually ineffective.”
Habibullah stressed that the challenges are long-standing but compounded by recent legislative changes. “Even earlier, shortages of commissioners led to huge backlogs. The commissions were intended as the last appellate authority under the RTI Act, ensuring quick disposal and binding decisions within the same infrastructure. That institution still exists, but its status has been somewhat lowered. If the commission had continued to function as a completely independent body, this might not have mattered. Whether it has functioned independently or not is for the public to judge.”
He added: “The RTI Act anticipated that suo motu disclosures would expand over time, just as the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court has widened over the years. Ideally, access to information should have grown. But now, the decisions of the Information Commissioners seem more focussed on protecting government positions and keeping information secure, rather than increasing transparency. This is something the commissions need to address.”
Empty posts at the Centre and States have paralyzed the transparency watchdog, while the Personal Data Protection Act weakens citizen access.
 |
| A 2018 demonstration in Delhi against delayed appointment of information commissioners, outside the Central Information Commission Bhawan. Photo Credit: SHIV KUMAR PUSHPAKAR |
The impact is already visible with 26,000 appeals and complaints pending. There are applicants who have been waiting for more than a year for their matters to be heard. Activists argue that such delays defeat the very purpose of the Right to Information (RTI) Act.
Commodore Lokesh Batra (retired), a transparency activist, told Frontline that the absence of a chief has brought the CIC to a standstill. “The chief is both adjudicator and administrator. The CIC is supposed to be the guardian of transparency for the people, for the law, not for the government. By not appointing anyone despite being fully aware of their retirement dates, the government is deliberately killing transparency,” he said. The RTI Act has no provision for an acting chief to head the CIC.
For Batra, the RTI Act is an important tool for citizens to participate in governance. “People have a right to know. We have to remember that the government owns nothing. These roads, this big infrastructure, these buildings they are all made with taxpayers’ money. They belong to the people. Even knowledge and information belong to the people. Passion for the country must mean passion to know about the country.”
Samariya was appointed Chief Information Commissioner on November 6, 2023, and retired upon reaching the age of 65. Before he took charge, the post had lain vacant for a month after Y.K. Singh’s retirement. Out of the 12 Chief Information Commissioners who have taken office since the RTI Act came into force in 2005, only 5 assumed charge the day after their predecessors retired. The first time the CIC was left without a chief was in August 2014 when Rajiv Mathur retired.
Although the dates of vacancies were known in advance every retirement being routine, with the incumbent either attaining the age of 65 or completing his/her tenure the government has repeatedly failed to fill the posts on time. This is a direct violation of the Supreme Court’s 2019 judgment, which laid down clear directions to ensure vacancies are filled in a timely manner.
In Anjali Bhardwaj v. Union of India (2019), the court warned that vacancies would “badly affect the functioning of the Act, which may even amount to negating the very purpose for which this Act came into force”.
More recently, in October 2023, the court cautioned that the RTI Act risked becoming a “dead letter” if posts remained unfilled. This is not an isolated lapse. Vacancies have remained unfulfilled since November 2023. Despite advertisements being issued first in August 2024 for the eight Information Commissioner posts, and again in May 2025 for the chief’s position—the government has failed to complete the selection process. In January this year, the Centre told the Supreme Court that appointments would be made by April 2025.
On September 26, 2025, the Supreme Court heard a case on the non-appointment of information commissioners before a bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi. Advocate Prashant Bhushan, arguing for the petitioners, noted that despite earlier directives, vacancies in the Central Information Commission remain unfilled. The commission has only two members, with over 26,800 appeals and complaints pending and hearings delayed by more than a year.
The court was also told that the Jharkhand State Information Commission has been defunct since May 2020, five years and four months. In January 2025, the court had directed the largest opposition party in the Vidhan Sabha to nominate one of its members to the selection committee for appointing a Chief and commissioners. The matter is listed next for October 27, 2025.
In response to an RTI petition filed by Batra in July 2025, the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) confirmed that 83 applications had been received for the post of Chief Information Commissioner in response to the May advertisement. Earlier, in September 2024, another RTI petition revealed that 161 applications had been received after vacancies for Information Commissioners were advertised; yet, no appointments followed. “Since then, there has been more than a year’s delay, and the vacancies are still not filled,” Batra said.
 |
| Former CIC Heeralal Samariya Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES |
For Venkatesh Nayak, RTI activist and director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the CIC remaining headless is part of a troubling pattern. It is, he said, “a clear indication of the lack of importance and primacy given to the implementation of the law. It is part of a general trend we have seen over the years wherein various institutions including statutory bodies and universities are let to languish for months without the vacancies being filled. This is most unfortunate because this government is certainly not short of staff to do this work.”
Nayak stressed that the issue reflects poorly on the Prime Minister himself, since the DoPT, which oversees appointments to the CIC, is part of his portfolio. “The Central Information Commission constitutes the oversight mechanism on transparent governance. And if such a body remains headless and without an adequate number of commissioners, then people’s grievances about lack of transparency or inadequate access to information in relation to their RTI applications will remain unaddressed for months together.” The pendency figures bear this out. “Today, the ordinary wait time is about 8 to 12 months or even longer before the commission,” Nayak noted. “There are more than 25,000 appeals and complaints pending. By the time information is disclosed, it often becomes obsolete.”
India has 28 State Information Commissions (SICs) and 1 CIC. The RTI Act mandates that each commission have 1 Chief Information Commissioner and up to 10 Information Commissioners, depending on the workload. The rot is not confined to the Centre the SICs across the country face the same neglect. “There are States like Jharkhand where there wasn’t a single commissioner as of last year,” Nayak pointed out, citing a study by the Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS).
“In Karnataka and Maharashtra, multiple commissioner posts remain vacant, leaving entire divisions without adjudication. Commissioners are supposed to be based in different parts of the State so that people can have better access to them. But when vacancies don’t get filled up, cases simply go unheard.”
According to the “Report Card of Information Commissions in India 2023-24”, compiled and published by the SNS in January 2025, seven Information Commissions were defunct for varying periods between July 1, 2023, and June 30, 2024, in Jharkhand, Telangana, Goa, Tripura, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh. Four commissions in Jharkhand, Telangana, Tripura, and Goa remained defunct, while five were without a chief in Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Uttarakhand, and Odisha. As of June 30, 2024, more than four lakh appeals and complaints were pending across the 29 commissions.
The report also revealed another irony: although Section 25 of the RTI Act mandates that each commission shall prepare and publish an annual report on the implementation of the Act, 62 per cent of the commissions had not published their 2022-23 reports. “The transparency bodies do not publish data regarding RTIs, making it difficult to even understand the full scale of RTI use in the CIC and SICs,” Nayak observed.
Nayak also explained how the vacancies impact the performance of Information Commissions. Section 20 of the RTI Act empowers Information Commissions to impose fines of up to Rs.25,000 on erring Public Information Officers (PIO). With vacancies piling up, pendency stretches over a year, eroding the threat of penalties against non-compliant officials. “Because commissions have become so slow in disposing of cases, the threat of penalties simply disappears,” Nayak said. “A PIO who ignores an RTI application or refuses information knows his case may not be heard for over a year. By then, he’ll be transferred, and the commission will simply call whoever is in charge. The accountability aspect of RTI implementation vanishes into thin air.”
He added: “When commissions themselves are riddled with vacancies, PIOs know cases won’t come up for months. The seriousness with which they should respond disappears.”
 |
| A 2018 protest against proposed amendments in the RTI Act, in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES |
Legislative changes have further weakened the RTI regime. The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, passed in 2023, amended Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act, replacing the earlier public-interest test for disclosure of personal information with a blanket exemption. Several civil rights and journalist bodies had warned that this change could hollow out the RTI Act and undermine press freedom.
The DPDP Act is intended to “provide for the processing of digital personal data in a manner that recognises both the right of individuals to protect their personal data and the need to process such personal data for lawful purposes”. But in doing so, it rewrites one of the most important provisions of the RTI Act.
Section 8(1)(j) earlier stated that personal information could only be withheld if it had no relationship to public interest or would cause unwarranted invasion of privacy, unless the larger public interest justified disclosure. This required PIOs to weigh competing claims of privacy and transparency.
Section 44(3) of the DPDP Act, however, reduced this safeguard to a single line: “information which relates to personal information”. By removing the balance test, the scope for denying information has dramatically widened. “This is hugely problematic, retrograde, and will reduce the efficacy of the RTI Act,” Nayak said. “Now it says any personal information about an individual cannot be disclosed. This destroys anti-corruption efforts and accountability-seeking under RTI.”
The amendment also deleted a critical provision that ensured parity between citizens and legislators: information that could not be denied to Parliament or State legislatures could not be denied to citizens. “That parity between citizens and elected representatives in terms of information access has simply been destroyed,” Nayak argued.
Additionally, the DPDP Act creates a new Data Protection Board, entirely government-appointed, to decide disputes over personal data. “The board will be the final arbiter on personal data issues. Since it is a later and special law, it could override the Information Commissions. The board will be entirely government-appointed, unlike the CIC, which at least involves the Leader of Opposition in appointments. This risks making the RTI Act subordinate to privacy concerns without safeguards for public interest,” Nayak warned.
Already, Nayak says, PIOs in some States have begun citing the DPDP Act to deny disclosures, even though its rules have not yet been notified. “The opacity is intensifying even before the law has been enforced,” he said. “The accountability-seeking aspect of the RTI Act will unfortunately be completely squashed by the implementation of DPDP.”
Wajahat Habibullah, the first Chief Information Commissioner who oversaw the RTI regime in its formative years, says the weakening of the CIC is as much about status as it is about vacancies. “The law has been watered down. The office of the commissioner has been made beholden to the government. Appointments as well as the powers exercised by the Chief Information Commissioner are no longer as free as they were originally guaranteed by the law,” he told Frontline.
Habibullah recalled that when he served as Chief Information Commissioner, the position was on par with the Chief Election Commissioner, well above Chief Cabinet Secretary and equivalent to a Supreme Court Justice. Today, he noted, the Chief Information Commissioner ranks no higher than a Cabinet Secretary, while Information Commissioners are equivalent to Secretaries of the government of India. “You can see how this affects the Commission’s position as defined by government legislation.”
He also highlighted the practical implications of vacancies. “If there is no Chief Information Commissioner, the key appointee, the rulings of the Information Commission are, in fact, invalid. The chief determines the administration of the commission and the distribution of work. Without that leadership, the law is virtually ineffective.”
Habibullah stressed that the challenges are long-standing but compounded by recent legislative changes. “Even earlier, shortages of commissioners led to huge backlogs. The commissions were intended as the last appellate authority under the RTI Act, ensuring quick disposal and binding decisions within the same infrastructure. That institution still exists, but its status has been somewhat lowered. If the commission had continued to function as a completely independent body, this might not have mattered. Whether it has functioned independently or not is for the public to judge.”
He added: “The RTI Act anticipated that suo motu disclosures would expand over time, just as the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court has widened over the years. Ideally, access to information should have grown. But now, the decisions of the Information Commissioners seem more focussed on protecting government positions and keeping information secure, rather than increasing transparency. This is something the commissions need to address.”
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