NEW DELHI: Retired bureaucrats never retire. Stumped? A look at the information commissions, the transparency watchdogs, all over India reveals that they have become a re-employment arena for bureaucrats.Even though the Supreme Court has advised looking beyond retired civil servants for posts of information commissioners and chief information commissioners, governments prefer retired bureaucrats over candidates with specialisations in other fields.An annual study by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, exclusively accessed by ET, reveals 25 of the 29 information commissions, including the Central Information Commission, are headed by retired civil servants. Information commissions in Goa, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand are without chiefs. The study found that 76 per cent of the chief information commissioners across are retired IAS officers —it was 69 per cent in 2014 and 74 per cent in 2012.The proportion is lower for information commissioners assisting the chief. The study found that 35 of the 87 commissioners (42.5 per cent) are retired civil servants from all India services or state civil services. This compares with 50 per cent in 2014 and 53 per cent in 2012.CHRI’s programme coordinator Venkatesh Nayak sees this trend as a complete violation of the Supreme Court’s advice in the 2013 Union of India vs Namit Sharma judgement."This tendency indicates the governments are interested in controlling the information commissions through the bureaucracy to ensure that a degree of conservatism colours the approach of the information commissioners while deciding appeals and complaints. Unfortunately, information commissions are becoming extensions of the government itself," said Nayak.Even as India completed a decade of implementation of the RTI Act on June 20, the study pointed how the RTI machinery is gradually crumbling in the states. The number of vacancies in state information commissions has increased over the past year and the pendency of cases is spiralling. The study, conducted by CHRI team comprising Nayak, Seema Choudhary, Saine Paul, Rupa Bhattacharya and Varun Chopra, says 20 per cent of the posts at information commissions are vacant compared with 14.6 per cent in 2014.