No CIC commissioner appointed since Feb 24, 2013; pending cases touch 38,000

NEW DELHI: One year after it started looking for information commissioners for Central Information Commission ( CIC), the final appellate authority for Right to Information Act, the government hasn’t made a single appointment.

While the RTI watchdog has been headless for the last six months, complaints and appeals pending before CIC have reached an all-time high.

When the government had started looking for information commissioners on February 24 last year, only two slots had to be filled. But as it dragged its feet on the issue, the Commission now needs three information commissioners and one chief. The workload has reached an unprecedented number with 37,847 complaints and appeals pending before the Commission. RTI activists say that if no appointments are made and the workload keeps piling, the waiting time at CIC would be 2 to 3 years. Last year, this pendency was 22,300 cases in CIC – a 69.7% jump in 12 months.

The RTI Act has no provision for an acting chief, who can fill in till the appointment of the chief information commissioner. This way the RTI complaints and appeals of departments being handled by the chief have started piling up. The last chief information commissioner Rajiv Mathur had retired on August 22 last year. The government has always promoted the next senior information commissioner to the chief’s post but this practice was not followed. On the day of Mathur’s retirement, he had 7,448 cases pending before him.

At present, this number has almost doubled to 13,019. This means that out of the 37,847 pending cases, 34.34% are before the chief information commissioner. The departments under the chief include Prime Minister’s Office and ministries like defence, HRD, parliamentary affairs, power, steel, textile, Election Commission, CAG, CBI, Parliament, President’s Secretariat. The maximum complaints and appeals pending pertain to ministry of defence (3,563).

RTI activist Lokesh Batra, who has been filing RTI applications on the search for information commissioners, says, “It is nothing but slow poisoning of the RTI regime.”