A Supreme Court ruling has thrown an unexpected spanner into the Right to Information apparatus, bringing the Central and state information commissions to a confused stop. It has ordered that from now on, these commissions must have two heads, a judicial member and an expert member, and the chief information commissioner must be no one but a high court chief justice or Supreme Court judge, vetted by the Chief Justice of India  because their work, it deemed, was akin to that of a judicial tribunal.

The order was in response to a PIL that questioned the current eligibility criteria, which require the chief information commissioner and the information commissioners to have eminence and experience in "law, science and technology, social service, management, journalism, mass media or administration and governance". Of course, these offices have often been instrumentally wielded as another opportunity for patronage, or thoughtlessly packed with civil servants. However, should these procedural quibbles be settled by the judiciary at all? The court's order merely threatens to replace a bureaucratic monopoly with a judicial one.

Nowhere in this sweeping order is there a sense of why the eligibility requirements for commissioners were kept so open in the law passed by Parliament. Meanwhile, the entire functioning of the information commissions has been thrown into question. While the Supreme Court may believe that the commissioners' work requires them to be steeped in the law, it should pause to consider the advantages of breadth of experience. What's more, setting up the information commissions as a next step for judges would interfere with the adversarial dynamic that is ideal between the information commissions and various organs of government. As guardians of the RTI Act, they are meant to reflect the citizens' perspective, to wrest accountability from the powerful. This order throws up troubling questions for the future of the legislation.

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