As per the RTI Act, a citizen can file a request for information and the relevant department of the government is mandated to provide the information within 30 days. The officer responsible for this is the Public Information Officer (PIO). If the citizen is not satisfied with the response, she can do a followup appeal within 30 days of getting the information with an Appellate Authority, which is the officer in charge of the concerned department. If the citizen still doesn’t get the information or is dissatisfied, there is a second appeal step. This particular appeal can be made to the Central or State Information Commission within 90 days of when the decision for the first appeal is to be made.

Mind you, this is all very time-bound and has to be done according to the law. The latest assault on the Act concerns the final step: Information Commissions (IC).

The Information Commissions, at both state and Centre, have the power to direct the government to give the relevant information, compensate the citizen for any loss and even penalise the PIO for negligence of duty. But this can only happen if the IC is utterly independent and free of any form of control from the government. That is the case at this point of time but it is about to change.

Last week, on July 19, the government introduced a Bill titled “The Right to Information (Amendment) Bill, 2019”. This proposed law makes changes to the salaries and tenures of appointed information commissioners. The tenure right now is fixed at five years for each commissioner and the salary they get is equivalent to the Chief Election Commissioner and Election Commissioners, respectively. If this law gets passed—which it will real soon—both the salary and tenure will be decided by the central government by a simple babu-led notification.

Why are they doing this? Well, the rationale given in the Bill is this.