RTI report card highlights overwhelming presence of retired govt officials as information commissioners

NEW DELHI: A ‘report card’ on the working of information commissions below the Right To Information Act reveals that 57% of the roughly 510 commissioners for whom background information was out there had been retired govt officials.
Nearly 15% information commissioners had been legal professionals or former judges (11% had been advocates or from the judicial service and 4% had been retired judges), 12% commissioners had a background in journalism, 5% had been lecturers (academics, professors) and 4% had been social activists or staff.
The report highlights that regardless of the RTI Act offering that commissioners could be appointed from various backgrounds and fields — this being reiterated by the Supreme Court in its Feb 2019 judgment— the evaluation discovered {that a} majority of information commissioners have been appointed from amongst retired govt servants.
“Of the 148 chief information commissioners for whom data was obtained, an overwhelming 85% were retired govt servants. 9% had a background in law (4% former judges and 5% lawyers or judicial officers),” the report acknowledged.
This knowledge is a component of voluntary organisation Satark Nagrik Sangathan’s ‘Report Card of Information Commissions, 2023-24’. It appears on the efficiency of all 29 information commissions within the nation for the interval July 2023 until June 2024, based mostly on responses obtained to their RTI questions from the commissions.
The report card introduced out every year but once more brings into focus a worrisome concern as the gender composition of commissions continues to be extraordinarily skewed. Since the passage of the RTI Act in 2005, merely 9% of all information commissioners throughout the nation have been girls. Nine ICs have by no means ever had a lady commissioner since they had been constituted. These states embody Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Sikkim, Telangana, Uttarakhand and West Bengal.
Among chief information commissioners, the gender parity is even worse, with solely 5% chiefs ever being girls. As on Oct 12, 2024, none of the information commissions was headed by a lady.
Meanwhile, knowledge reveals that the common disposal of appeals and complaints per commissioner, calculated utilizing knowledge for the interval July 2023 to June 2024, reveals large variation throughout commissions. For occasion Maharashtra information fee had the very best annual common disposal price of 13,062 appeals/complaints per commissioner and SIC of Andhra Pradesh had an annual common disposal price of 1,141 instances per commissioner – every commissioner on a median successfully disposing lower than 5 instances a day – though greater than 10,000 instances had been pending.
The report additionally brings into focus what number of ICs had been discovered to be returning a really giant quantity of instances with out passing any orders. For occasion, the Central Information Commission returned practically 14,000 appeals/complaints whereas it registered 19,347 through the interval below evaluate.
As many as 2,31,417 appeals and complaints had been registered between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024 by 27 information commissions. During the identical time interval, 2,25,929 instances had been disposed by 28 commissions. The quantity of appeals and complaints pending on June 30, 2024 within the 29 information commissions, stood at 4,05,509.