THE WAR ON INFORMATION

The Central Information Commission (CIC) is headless again. Nearly 35,000 cases are currently pending in the CIC, and five out of 11 posts of commissioners, including the chief information commissioner, are vacant. This is even after the Supreme Court directed in February 2019 that appointments of information commissioners must be timely and made in a transparent manner.

Vacancies in commissions lead to large backlogs resulting in concomitant delays in hearing cases. Appeals and complaints pending before the CIC were filed as far back as 2017, which negates the very purpose of the RTI law.

Every year, around six million people, including the poorest and the most marginalised, exercise their fundamental right to information and file applications under the

RTI Act. Information is sought on a host of issues, ranging from delivery of basic rights and entitlements to exposing big-ticket corruption and abuse of power.

Under the law, information commissions have been set up to adjudicate on appeals and complaints of citizens who are denied their right to information. There have been several cases where, exercising their statutory powers, commissioners of the CIC have directed public authorities to disclose information the government has been reluctant to share. Recent orders include directions to provide records related to demonetisation, information about the deliberative process adopted while formulating the controversial electoral bonds scheme, details of high-profile loan defaulters of public sector banks and records related to the educational qualifications of the prime minister and his foreign travels.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the CIC has been in the eye of the storm. There has been a concerted attempt by the government to undermine the institution. It is a matter of record that not a single information commissioner has been appointed in the CIC since May 2014 without the intervention of the courts. The emasculation of the commission has not been limited to the refusal to make timely appointments. Recent amendments to the sunshine law, and the concomitant rules promulgated by the central government, have dealt a severe blow to the autonomy of information commissions.

Under the RTI Act of 2005, commissioners had high status and security of tenure to enable them to function independently and direct even the highest offices to comply with the provisions of the law. The RTI Amendment Act passed in July 2019, despite strong opposition both in Parliament and outside it, empowers the Centre to make rules to decide the tenure and salaries of all commissioners in the country. The RTI rules, drafted subsequently without any public consultation, reduced the tenure of all information commissioners from five to three years. They did away with the high stature guaranteed to commissioners in the original law. By removing the equivalence to the post of election commissioners, the rules ensure that salaries of information commissioners can be revised only at the whim of the central government. More significantly, they allow the government to relax any provision and fix different tenures, salaries and terms of service for different commissioners. This destroys the design of the original RTI Act, which insulated commissioners from government overreach, and effectively reduces them to the proverbial caged parrots.

Realising that it was practically impossible to control decentralised use of the law by millions of people across the country, governments have turned their attention to the nodal institutions that control the flow of information. The attempt to paralyse information commissions is not limited to the Centre alone; many state governments face the same charge. As of December 2019, Maharashtra had a backlog of over 50,000 cases. In Andhra Pradesh, the failure to appoint information commissioners has meant that the State Information Commission was non-functional for 17 months. Even today, the commission is without a chief.

Repeated and deliberate efforts by governments, especially the current government at the Centre, to undermine the institution of information commissions weaken the basic edifice of the RTI Act. It’s ironic that this government came to power in 2014 on an anti-corruption plank. The law, which has empowered people across the country to exercise their democratic right to question, dissent and show truth to power, is facing an unprecedented attack. ■

Repeated efforts by the Centre to undermine the institution of information commissions weaken the basic edifice of the RTI Act