For the fifth time in six years, the Central Information Commission is headless, with the retirement of Bimal Julka as Chief Information Commissioner and the name of his successor yet to be announced by the government.
Julka, who had taken charge as CIC on March 6 this year, retired on Wednesday. In fact, his appointment had been made almost two months after the retirement of his predecessor, Sudhir Bhargava.
Activists point out that in the last six years, the commission has been headless on as many as five occasions, including the present situation. Bhargava's appointment as CIC had happened in January 2019, while his predecessor, R.K. Mathur, had retired in December 2018.
A similar situation existed at the time of Mathur's appointment as the CIC in January 2016. The CIC was without a chief for a month after the retirement of Vijai Sharma from the post in December 2015.
The first time the CIC had gone headless was in August 2014 with the retirement of Rajiv Mathur from the post. It was after a gap of 10 months that Sharma was appointed, in June 2015.
The RTI Act does not have a provision for having an acting chief as a stop-gap measure till the appointment of the next CIC.
“I have lost track of the number of times the CIC has gone headless since 2014,” said RTI activist commodore Lokesh Batra (retd.).
Also, while the sanctioned strength of information commissioners in the Central appellate body for RTI is 10, at present, it has six commissioners. One of them, Information Commissioner D.P. Sinha, completes his tenure on September 25 this year. The four vacancies have persisted since November 2018.
Activists have often complained about the CIC not having its full strength of commissioners and say this is especially worrisome in the face of the growing pendency of cases before the commission.
As on August 27, there is pendency of 35,880 cases in the commission. As many as 31,070 of these are appeals and 4,810 are complaints.
Moreover, a similar situation exists in the state commissions. At present, six state information commissions—Bihar, Goa, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Tripura and Uttar Pradesh—are functioning without a chief information commissioner. The state chief information commissioner's post has remained vacant for several months in these bodies. Moreover, making matters worse in the Jharkhand state information commission, the information commissioner's position is also vacant.
