On 13 February 2014, Ajay Dubey, a Right to Information (RTI) activist based in Bhopal, filed an RTI regarding the appointment of government advocates in Madhya Pradesh (MP). Well-versed with the condition of RTI applications in the state, Dubey did not expect to get a reply from the Public Information Officer (PIO) of the Law and Legislative Affairs department of MP. “The government’s attitude is lacklustre when it comes to disseminating information under the RTI Act,” he told me during a conversation over the phone on 24 June 2015, last Wednesday.

However, contrary to Dubey’s expectations, the department did deign to send him a reply on 10 June 2015, more than a year after he had filed the application. The response shed light on the appointment of Swaraj Kaushal, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj’s husband, and Bansuri Kaushal, their daughter, as advocates for the government of MP. These appointments, Dubey alleged, were a result of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s desire to consolidate his position within the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP).

Under the provisions of the RTI Act —which mandates that any information sought under the RTI should be provided within 30 days—the 16 months that the state took to process this query would probably qualify as unduly long. But when you consider the abysmal state of the RTI act in MP, 16 months is barely anything.

In October 2014, the RTI Assessment and Advocacy Group (RaaG) and Centre for Equity Studies (CES)—an autonomous research institute based in Delhi—released a comprehensive study on the functioning of the RTI act in India. Between January 2012 and November 2013—the duration of the study—the State Information Commission (SIC) of MP received more than 8,000 applications; out of these it addressed 472. While Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh had a much higher figure of pending queries by the end of 2013—48,442 and 32,390 respectively—compared to MP that had 14,977, these states had disposed 83 and 98 percent of the cases they had received during the period of the study. Meanwhile, MP had responded to less than six percent of the total applications that had been filed in the state. “At the monthly rates of disposal reported by ICs (Information Commissioners), an appeal/complaint filed on January 1, 2014 would come up for hearing in the Madhya Pradesh IC after 60 years,” the study stated , “in the year 2074!”

This inefficiency could be attributed to the state government’s inability to recruit a single information commissioner (IC) for the SIC between December 2012 and January 2014. The RTI Act mandates 10 information commissioners in every state, all of whom work under a chief information commissioner (CIC). Between March 2012 and January 2014, the SIC in MP had not appointed anyone for 10 of the 11 posts that were vacant in the commission. In August 2012, Iqbal Ahmed—the only IC remaining in the department since March 2012—was promoted to the post of the CIC. After his retirement in December 2012, there was not a single officer in the SIC to process RTI queries in MP. “The State Information Commission is the apex body that oversees the implementation of a fundamental right—the right to information—and leaving that body vacant means denying people their rights,” Amrita Johri, one of the authors of the RaaG-CES study told me over the phone when I spoke to her on 24 June 2015.