How the Info Commission is killing your RTI

New Delhi: Having declared information commissions the biggest threat to Right To Information, Shailesh Gandhi, whose term as central information commissioner ends on Friday, predicts the fledgling transparency movement in India could be headed for a premature death.

The central information commission (CIC) currently has some 20,000 cases pending before it. At this level of pendency, the average time that a citizen has to wait for his appeal or complaint to be heard is between eight to nine months. In next five years, the waiting period could go up to 3-4 years, says Gandhi.

“If current trends continue, according to my forecast for the CIC, in the next five years the pendency could be over 80-90,000 appeals and complaints. That will mean a three-four year wait at the commission. If that happens the average person is no longer going to be interested in RTI," he said.

“Then what would happen is that the common man would stop using it and only very few die-hard activists will continue. But RTI would have lost relevance for the common for whose governance and empowerment it is meant for,” the chief information commissioner said.

RTI activists cite cases that have been pending before commissions for one, two, even four years.

“What is the reason that number of cases pending in the CIC is in the tens of thousands? A time-frame for hearing the case has to be made. The minimum time a citizen has to wait for a hearing at an information commission today is at least one year. This is the state of RTI today. Is it possible for the common man to wait for year for to get information?” says Afroz Alam Sahil, an RTI journalist.

Alam recalls an instance where, in the time it took for the CIC to hear his appeal against the Delhi Police for a document concerning the Batla House encounter, he had already got the document from the National Commission of Human Rights. “Imagine a situation where I am sitting with the document I requested for in my hand and I am still fighting for it at the CIC?”

What is causing such huge pendencies at the information commissions? The snail pace at which cases are being disposed off is to blame, says Gandhi. “When I joined the commission, the average disposal was about 1,500-2,000 cases per year per commissioner. Now it is about 3,000. My own disposal last year was 5,900 cases. And if every commissioner disposes even 5,000 cases a year, five years from now there will be no problem.”

Given the composition of the information commissions (there are 29 in India – 28 state information commissions and a central information commission that looks into RTI applications to the central government), the pace is not likely to pick up in a hurry.

According to a CHRI study (Rapid study of Information Commissions) released in May, two-thirds (66 per cent) of the information commissioners (central and state) are retired civil servants. In 2006-07 (a year after the RTI Act was passed), already a little over half (52 per cent) of the information commissioners were retired civil servants.

When information commissions have been turned into, to quote a protest poster, “a parking lot for retired bureaucrats,” it is not surprising that the culture of bureaucracy is taking over the very system that has been created to fight it.

But the composition and the slow pace that comes with it are not the only problems that are causing the commissions to choke. Lack of training of information commissioners on disposing off cases, lack of staff to man the offices, and unfilled positions for information commissioners are all adding to the problem.

According to the CHRI study, 30 per cent of the posts of information commissioners in the states are lying vacant. “Only 83 information commissioners (including chief information commissioners) have been appointed against 117 posts in 29 information commissioners,” the study states.

But Gandhi dismisses the suggestion that filling up posts for commissioners is a solution to the problem of pendency. “This is an absolutely false premise. Are we saying we must have commissioners who are under performing and therefore have more of them?” he asks.

But being understaffed, Gandhi admits, is a problem. But not one that is insurmountable. “It is true, we are understaffed. I’m not denying that. I am personally employing people in my staff whom I pay from my salary. The point I am making is that it is for the commissioners to fight this battle with the government. But that is now how it is being looked at all. All commissions say it is somebody else’s problem. That doesn’t seem right to me.”

Systematic procedures and time-frames to register and dispose off cases, activists believe, are necessary to make commissions more accountable. And implementation of a citizen’s charter, something Gandhi has been fighting for at the CIC, will commit commissions to deliver to citizens.

Not all numbers from the CIC, however, paint a bleak future for RTI. As Venkatesh Nayak, coordinator of the Right to Information Programme at CHRI, points out, 5.5 lakh RTI applications were received by central government departments and ministries in 2010-11. Of these, 28,875 registered their complaints and appeals with the CIC, implying that an overwhelming majority of citizens were satisfied with the information they received.

“What is heartening is that 5.5 lakh people wrote to the government, expressing their faith in democracy. The communication between the citizen and the government is improving and that is the biggest plus,” says Nayak.