The CIC is supposed to include its chief and 10 other information commissioners. But since 2016, it has only had six commissioners.

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the new Central Information Commission (CIC) headquarters earlier this week and said that “transparency and accountability are very important for democratic and participative governance”, and that agencies like the CIC play a significant role in this.

What the PM didn’t mention, however, is the fact that the CIC hasn’t been functioning at full strength since 2016. It has had four vacant positions for eighteen months now. In fact, while the government had advertised two positions for information commissioners in September 2016 and received 225 applications, not one appointment has been finalised so far.

How this could impact the CIC

The CIC was established in 2005 after the Right to Information Act came into force. According to the act, the CIC is made up of one chief information commissioner and 10 other information commissioners. However, at present, apart from R.K. Mathur, who heads the body, the CIC has only six other information commissioners.

According to RTI activist Commodore (retired) Lokesh Batra, four more information commissioners’ tenures will end by November 2018, and with fewer commissioners, cases will continue to pile up, and fewer RTIs will receive responses.

“This delay in appointing commissioners is going to have a huge impact on diluting the transparency law,” he said.

In response to an RTI application filed by Batra on the status of filling these positions, the Department of Personnel & Training said that “as per section 8(1)(i) of the RTI Act, 2005, the information as requested cannot be given at this stage”.

Section 8 of the RTI Act is about exemption from the disclosure of information, and 8(1)(i) says that there is no obligation to give citizens information to do with cabinet papers. These include records of deliberations of the council of ministers, secretaries and other officers, provided that the decision taken by them will be made public when the matter is over, and provided those matters come under other exemptions mentioned.

Batra has been pursuing the government on this matter. In January 2018, even Mathur asked the Prime Minister’s Office to respond to Batra, and explain why there has been a delay in answering why information commissioners haven’t been appointed yet. The response from the DoPT came after this plea.

The tenures of all the current information commissioners will end in the next two years, because they will all either reach the retirement age of 65, or complete their five-year tenures.

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