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Court notice on vacancies in information panels
Why it is in news?
- The Supreme Court directed the Centre and eight State governments to respond to a petition highlighting that a large number of vacancies in the Central Information Commission and the State Information Commissions have crippled the Right to Information Act and resulted in a huge backlog.
- A Bench led by Justice A.K. Sikri issued a notice to the Centre and Maharashtra, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Telangana, Karnataka, Odisha and Gujarat.
Petition
- The effective functioning of information commissioners, the final adjudicators under the RTI Act, is critical for the health of the transparency regime in the country, the petition said.
- The petition said that due to non-appointment of information commissioners, several information commissions take many months, and in some cases even years, to decide on appeals and complaints due to accumulation of pending appeals/complaints, defeating the entire object of the RTI Act, 2005.
- Currently, there are four vacancies in the Central Information Commission, though more than 23,500 appeals and complaints are pending.
- The Andhra Pradesh Commission is completely non-functional as not a single information commissioner has been appointed.
- The Maharashtra Commission which has a backlog of more than 40,000 appeals and complaints, has four vacancies.
- The Kerala Commission is functioning with only a single commissioner and has more than 14,000 pending appeals and complaints.
- Similarly, there are six vacancies in the Karnataka Commission even though nearly 33,000 appeals and complaints are pending.
- Odisha is functioning with only three commissioners and Telangana with two commissioners and their backlogs are more than 10,000 and 15,000 appeals/complaints, respectively.
- The West Bengal Commission is functioning with only two commissioners and is currently hearing appeals/complaints filed 10 years ago.
Source
The Hindu