So what does appointing a CIC entail that it has taken so long? On the last day of the previous year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved the formation of a search committee, which would recommend shortlisted candidates to another committee (this one includes Modi himself). However, the first search committee had to be disbanded as soon as two of its members were themselves applicants – a hilarious situation on the surface, but suggestive of a total lack of coordination among different governmental agencies. Even more curiously, it turned out (in the form of an RTI response) that there were no minutes to the committee’s meetings being maintained – and the DoPT has no official record of who attended the meetings. “The fact that they don’t have records of the meeting means that this is a systematic ploy to kill the RTI,” says Shankar Singh, one of the pioneers of the country’s RTI movement.