Expenditure on India's information commissions has fallen 91% in six years

Since FY17, the budget allocation for information commissions has shrunk by 82.7% from Rs 31.9 crore

The number of Right to Information (RTI) queries received in Financial Year 2021 (FY21) increased by 45.7 per cent to 1.33 million in six years, according to the Central Information Commission's annual report for 2020-21. However, the budget allocated to the information commissions has plunged.

Since FY17, the budget allocation for India's information commissions (ICs) has fallen by 82.7 per cent, from Rs 31.9 crore to Rs 5.5 crore in FY22 (source: Budget documents). Although between FY17 and 18, the expenditure on ICs overshot the budget, it has since reduced. Actual spending on the ICs across the country has declined by 90.6 per cent – to Rs 3.5 crore in FY22 from Rs 37.24 crore six years ago.

A Business Standard analysis of the expenditure profile of the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions found that capital expenditure on ICs and RTIs has reduced almost seven times in the same period.

Reduced budget allocation is just one of the troubles afflicting India’s information commissions. A study titled “Report card on the performance of Information Commissions in India, 2021-22” released in October 2022 by Satark Nagrik Sangathan, a citizen’s initiative working with a mandate to promote transparency in governance, shows that due to a low disposal rate of cases, pleas filed under the RTI Act are piling up in state information commissions (SIC).

The report, which studied data from SICs between July 2021 and June 2022, found that in 25 information commissions, a total of 212,443 appeals and complaints were registered till June 2022.  

The RTI Act mandates that every information commission should consist of a chief information commissioner (CIC) and 10 information commissioners. However, three posts at the Central Information Commission have been lying vacant since November 2020, finds the report. West Bengal and Bihar have less than half of the required number of commissioners. And in Jharkhand and Tripura, all the positions, including that of CIC, have been lying vacant for the last 29 months and 15 months, respectively, according to the report. 

Two out of eight states (for which data is available) were functioning without a CIC. The remaining six reported not having a CIC for varying lengths of time. 

As of June 2022, the Central Information Commission had 26,724 appeals and complaints pending. Of the 25 state commissions for which data is available, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka had higher complaints pending than the Central Information Commission.

The report also found that out of the 23 state information commissions for which data is available, 10 are likely to take more than a year to dispose of a complaint or appeal. In the current scenario, the West Bengal commission, it found, would require 24 years and three months to dispose of a complaint – the highest among all. 

Under the Act, state commissions are required to publish their annual reports. However, only nine of 29 state ICs have published their annual reports for 2020-21, according to the Satark Nagrik Sangathan report.