Meeting to decide new CIC deferred

The meeting of Selection Committee headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to decide the new chief of Central Information Commission (CIC), which was headless for over a week, has been deferred for next week.
The meeting was to take place today at Parliament House but now it has been deferred for next week, official sources said.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Leader of Congress in Lok Sabha Mallikarjuna Kharge, are members of the three-member panel.
The meeting is likely to take place next week, they said.
The transparency watchdog has gone headless, for the second time since the BJP Government came into power in 2014, after Vijai Sharma completed his tenure on December 1. Sharma was appointed to the post on June 9, this year.

The CIC was without its chief for nearly 10 months after the completion of the tenure of the then Chief Information Commissioner Rajiv Mathur in August 2014.

A total of 33,619 complaints and appeals are pending in the Commission as on today, as per official data.
The watchdog comprises of one chief and ten Information Commissioners.
At present, there are seven Information Commissioners-- Basant Seth, Yashovardhan Azad, Sharat Sabharwal, Manjula Prasher, M A Khan Yusufi, Madabhushanam Sridhar Acharyulu and Sudhir Bhargava-- in the Commission.
Chief Information Commissioner is the administrative head
of the Central Information Commission having powers to allocate or reallocate work.

The change comes within two days of Acharyulu's order directing inspection of 1978 records becoming public.
On January 8, it was reported that Acharyulu had directed the Delhi University to allow inspection of records of students who had passed BA course in 1978, the year in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi, according to the University, had also cleared the examination.
In his order, dated December 21, on the plea of one Neeraj who had sought to know from the University the total number of students who appeared for Bachelor of Arts examination in 1978, their names and those of their fathers, roll numbers and marks obtained.

Denying the information, the Central Public Information Officer of the University had said the information requested was "personal information of the students concerned, the disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or interest".
Acharyulu, however, said, "With regard to question whether disclosure of such identification related information causes invasion of privacy, or is that unwarranted invasion of privacy, the PIO has not put forward any evidence or explained possibility to show that disclosure of degree related information infringes the privacy or causes unwarranted invasion of privacy".
"If the degree related information sought is about a celebrity or an ordinary man, the access to information has to be provided by the public authority. The PIO did not come up with any basis for considering the degree related information of the students as third party information, except claiming so," he had said.

Observing that the CPIO should have applied her mind before denying information, Acharyulu said the Commission found neither merit nor legality in the contention of the University that the degree related information about students was third party information.