NEW DELHI: Seven former information commissioners on Wednesday called for the withdrawal of the RTI (Amendment) Bill, 2019, awaiting consideration by the Rajya Sabha, on the grounds that it attacks the autonomy of information commissioners as well as the people's fundamental right to know.

Describing the government's clarifications on the need to amend the RTI Act in Parliament "eloquent, but weak on facts", former chief information commissioners Wajahat Habibullah and Deepak Sandhu said the attempt to "downgrade" the level of the information commissioners is "not in keeping with law."

"The right to information has been, through repeated Supreme Court judgments, deemed a constitutional right under Article 19 - freedom of speech and expression - of the Constitution. Instead of weakening the CIC, the government should, in fact, elevate it to the level of a constitutional authority," Habibullah said. The government has argued that as a statutory body, the CIC could not be at par with election commissioners or Supreme Court judges.

Sandhu also criticised the government for its failure to hold pre-legislative consultations and argued that while the NDA government was seeking to downgrade the CIC and information commissioners, it had in 2017 harmonised 19 statutory bodies, including the armed forces tribunal and the film certification tribunal, by increasing their salaries and perks.

The information veterans deemed as weak the government’s argument that EC and CIC should not be on a par since the latter is a statutory body. “Both CEC and CIC enforce a constitutional obligation: one the right to vote, the second the right to know. Also, the salaries and tenure of the ICs were already fixed in 2004 when the bill was referred to a parliamentary standing committee. So it is unclear why the government wants to amend this law,” said Yashovardhan Azad.

Sridhar Acharyulu also said the bill attacked the principle of cooperative federalism by allowing the Centre to fix tenure and emoluments of state information commissioners even though their salaries are paid out of the state’s fund.

