Central Information Commission reaches full strength after nine-year gap

The Central Information Commission has attained full strength after nine years following the appointment of a new chief and eight information commissioners, amid concerns over backlog and transparency

After a gap of nine years, transparency watchdog, the Central Information Commission, has returned to full strength with the appointment of former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Raj Kumar Goyal as chief information commissioner (CIC) and eight other information commissioners, all of whom took the oath of office on Monday.

 

The post of CIC had fallen vacant after Heeralal Samariya completed his term on September 13. The Commission is headed by a CIC and can have up to 10 information commissioners. With the latest appointments, the body has reached full strength for the first time in more than nine years, transparency activists said.

 

 

Right to Information activists Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johari said the Centre appointed the CIC and eight information commissioners “after repeated directions of the Supreme Court to fill vacancies”. They said the Supreme Court, since December 2018, had in multiple orders directed the filling of all vacancies in view of the large backlog of appeals and complaints before the Commission. The watchdog will finally function at full strength after December 2016, they said. The backlog currently exceeds 31,000 appeals and complaints, and it takes more than a year for a matter to be heard by the Commission, according to the activists, who were petitioners in a related Supreme Court case.

 

The Supreme Court, in its 2019 judgment and subsequent orders, had also directed the government to ensure transparency in the appointment process for information commissioners under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. “We are constrained to note that important information such as the short-listing criteria adopted by the search committee and the list of applicants and short-listed candidates was not placed in the public domain,” Bhardwaj and Johari said in a statement.

 

A three-member panel headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week recommended the names of the Chief Information Commissioner and eight information commissioners for appointment. President Droupadi Murmu administered the oath of office to Goyal as CIC at a ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan. Later, in the presence of two incumbent information commissioners, Anandi Ramalingam and Vinod Kumar Tiwari, Goyal administered the oath of office to the eight new appointees.

 

Goyal is a retired 1990-batch IAS officer of the Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram-Union Territories (AGMUT) cadre. He superannuated on August 31 as secretary in the Department of Justice under the Ministry of Law and Justice. He has also served as secretary (border management) in the Ministry of Home Affairs and held key positions at the Centre and in the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir.

 

The eight information commissioners include former Railway Board chair Jaya Verma Sinha; former Indian Police Service officer Swagat Das, who held senior roles in the Intelligence Bureau, the Home Ministry and the Cabinet Secretariat; Central Secretariat Service officer Sanjeev Kumar Jindal; former IAS officer Surendra Singh Meena; and former Indian Forest Service officer Khushwant Singh Sethi. Senior journalists P R Ramesh and Ashutosh Chaturvedi, and former Indian Legal Service officer Sudha Rani Relangi, have also been sworn in as information commissioners.

 

The names of the CIC and the eight information commissioners were cleared at a meeting of the Modi-led selection committee, which included Union Home Minister Amit Shah and the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi. The Congress leader flagged the lack of representation from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes among the shortlisted candidates.