Four state information commissions defunct with no commissioners: Report

Four state information commissions, the top appellate bodies in RTI-related matters in states, have been lying defunct with no information commissioners to adjudicate complaints and appeals against public authorities, a report said on Friday.

The report by Satark Nagrik Sangathan, a transparency advocacy group, on the eve of the 19th anniversary of the enactment of the Right to Information Act, said the state information commissions in Goa, Jharkhand, Tripura, and Telangana have been without a commissioner.

According to the RTI Act, the state and central information commissions have a Chief Information Commissioner and 10 Information Commissioners to adjudicate complaints and appeals filed by citizens if the public authority does not supply information sought by them as per provisions of the law.

The report said no information commissioner was appointed in Jharkhand after the completion of the tenure of the last incumbent on May 8, 2020, rendering it completely defunct for more than four years.

In Tripura, the SIC has been defunct for over three years, in Telangana for 19 months and in Goa for seven months, it said.

Several Information Commissions including the Central Information Commission are functioning with reduced capacity because of vacant positions of Information Commissioners.

The Central Information has just three information commissioners, including the chief, as against the total strength of 11.

The report said 2,31,417 appeals and complaints were registered between July 1, 2023, and June 30, 2024, by 27 information commissions for which relevant information was available.

"During the same period, 2,25,929 cases were disposed of by 28 commissions," it said, analysing the data released by the commissions.

The Maharashtra SIC disposed of the highest number of cases (56,603) followed by the SICs of Uttar Pradesh (31,510) and Karnataka (28,630), it said.

The study claimed that the Central Information Commission returned nearly 14,000 appeals and complaints while it registered 19,347 during the period which comes to 42 per cent of cases which came to the the CIC.

"CIC website discloses how many appeals/complaints were re-submitted to the CIC after addressing deficiencies. The data reveals that nearly 96 per cent of the cases which were returned to the appellant/complainant were not re-submitted to the CIC by them," it said.

The report said the number of appeals and complaints pending on June 30, 2024, in the 29 information commissions, stood at 4.05 lakh.

According to the report, the backlog of appeals and complaints has increased significantly in recent years.

"The 2019 assessment found that as of March 31, 2019, a total of over 2.18 lakh cases were pending in the 26 information commissions from which data was obtained, which climbed to over 2.86 lakh as of June 30, 2021, and crossed 3 lakh in June 2022. Last year, the backlog stood at over 3.88 lakh as of June 30, 2023," it said.

Fourteen commissions would take a year or more to dispose of a matter brought before them with Chattisgarh SIC may take over five years to dispose of an application going by the disposal rate and pendency, the report said.

The estimated time required for disposal of an appeal or complaint in the CIC was found to be one year and four months, it said.

"The long delays in disposal of cases can be attributed largely to two factors: vacancies in commissions and tardy rate of disposal by commissioners. While the CIC has set a norm of 3,200 cases per commissioner annually for disposal of matters, other information commissions have not adopted any norms regarding the number of cases a commissioner should deal with in a year," it said.

The Information Commissions are tasked with ensuring transparency in the functioning of government bodies but in terms of mandatory availability of annual reports on the website of respective Information Commissions, 33 per cent of them have not made their latest annual report available on their website, the report said.