‘THE CIC NEEDS A CHIEF’

A professor at Hyderabad’s National Academy of Legal Studies and Research before his appointment as information commissioner in 2013, Madabhushanam Sridhar is the only one at the Central Information Commission from outside the civil services. The Central Information Commission now has 40,000 pending cases. Statistically, that means an appeal will take an average of over a year before a new appeal is heard if all ICs clear 300 cases every month. For a country of 120 crore people and hundreds of central institutions, the RTI Act provided for just 11 commissioners including the chief. This limit on the total number of commissioners is a serious deficiency in the law. The delays could grow as more people start asking questions. Haven’t vacancies at the CIC for the past 10 months added to the delays? When posts of four out of 11 commissioners are vacant, it is natural that pendency will grow. Personally, it pains me to see people having to wait such a long time for receiving basic information that should not have been denied in any case — like this person who has been trying to get a death certificate from 2008 onwards. He filed an RTI petition in 2013 and received the certificate today. I had threatened to impose a penalty on the official at the last hearing. This commission is largely run on the strength of outsourced staff who the government insists cannot be paid more than the minimum wages. Can the CIC exist without the chief? Just as the country has to have a Prime Minister and President at all times, and the Supreme Court to have a chief justice, the CIC also needs the chief to exist according to the RTI Act.

RTI activists allege the delay is a deliberate strategy by the government to weaken the information law? I think the role of RTI in unearthing big corruption has been rather over-emphasised. Government leaders don’t really need to be concerned about all this. Yes, sometimes an embarrassing fact or two might come out in the short term but if corrective action is taken, it helps the government. For example, in a case I handled, it turned out that the Parliament and Supreme Court complexes did not have fire clearance. The Supreme Court immediately took corrective steps but Parliament did not. A fire broke out in Parliament some time later.