Y K Sinha protected India's image abroad. Now, he must do it at home

The ex-IFS officer takes over as CIC at a time when activists believe the RTI Act has been whittled down progressively

Officers of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) are generally considered cerebral thought warriors who inhabit exotic locales and protect India’s interests abroad while having a cushy time of it. But there is another side to them: One that tussles bureaucracies both foreign and Indian, streamlines administrative systems, and generally deals with the unwashed masses who are far away from home, and sees the embassy/high commission as their only link with their roots. An Indian diplomat can be successful only if he wears his band gala with aplomb but can also shuck it off if necessary, roll up his sleeves, and be ready to use a shovel with equal ease.

Take Y K Sinha (IFS 1981 batch), whose last job in the foreign service was India’s high commissioner in London. He has just been appointed chief information commissioner (CIC) after being an information commissioner for a year and 10 months. As India’s high commissioner in Sri Lanka, Sinha oversaw house-building (India built 15,000 homes for the displaced in the northern, eastern, and central provinces in the country and was nominated for a world award for habitat), navigated the country’s criminal justice system (four Indian fishermen sentenced to death for allegedly smuggling drugs were released and sent back home, even though the charges against them were not dropped) and was instrumental in helping the island roll out the National Ambulance Service in 2015 — the same service that is responsible for saving many lives during the Covid-19 infection. He was posted in the UAE, where, like all other Indian ambassadors, he too battled the system to ensure livelihood and rights for expatriate workers. As joint secretary in the Pakistan Afghanistan Iran (PAI) division, the treatment to Pakistani prisoners in India and Indians in Pakistani prisons was monitored by him regularly. These were humdrum domestic concerns that all diplomats have to deal with.

Sinha is the second IFS officer to become information commissioner. The first was Sharat Sabharwal, India’s former ambassador in Pakistan. So the opposition charge — that IFS officers “are not suited” for the job — has not been thought through.

However, Sinha is getting the top job at a sensitive time. Right-to-information activists believe that the law has been whittled down progressively and the last blow to it was the amendment to the RTI Act, passed by Parliament in July last year. The amendment empowers the government to decide the term of the chief information commissioner and information commissioners, as distinct from the original term of five years or until the age of 65 (whichever comes sooner). The government now controls their salaries, allowances, and other terms of service. Opposition parties argued that authorising the government to take a call on the employment and pay scale of the RTI authorities was a way of curtailing the autonomy of the information commissioners. But because it did not have the numbers in the Lok Sabha and could not muster its persuasive strength in the Rajya Sabha, the changes went through. Organisations like the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information say the dilution of the independence of the RTI commissioners goes completely against the grain of a standing committee recommendation that they should actually be ranked with the election commissioners!

But every chief information commissioner has seen his job differently. Judging by the orders as information commissioner, it seems Sinha is going to bring a measure of humaneness to a law that does not pretend to be a grievance redress mechanism, but can sensitise the state about rules that make no sense. For instance, as information commissioner, he was given charge of Delhi. The Delhi Subordinate Services Selection Board (DSSSB) holds competitive examinations for recruitment. But it does not allow candidates to access their answer sheets — so no candidate who hasn’t made it knows what mistakes he made and what he must change to be selected.

The matter came as a second appeal before Sinha after previous RTI applications by a candidate who took the examination for the post of additional engineer, was unsuccessful and sought to know why, was denied his answer sheets. RTIs to the Board elicited no information. When Sinha called them, in their defence, the DSSSB said it could not let candidates have a copy of the answer sheet because then the identity of the examiner would be revealed. “We have never done it” said the Board (the entire correspondence is on the Information Commission website). Sinha ordered that the names of the examiners be redacted and the information be given to the applicant. This was a seemingly minor but significant victory — against rules that have no meaning.

As chief information commissioner, now Sinha will have to fight the battle that has bedevilled the RTI architecture consistently -- it is just not taken seriously. Positions of information commissioners lie vacant for years, not just at the Centre but also in the states. If he can jolt the system into the realisation that RTI is an opportunity, not a threat, he will have achieved a significant victory.