As RTI turns 15, 9 out of 29 information commissions are headless

In a situation that puts a question mark on the functioning of the Right to Information infrastructure,  as many as nine out of the 29 information commissions in the country are currently headless, and two state appellate bodies are completely defunct as no new commissioners have been appointed upon the incumbents demitting office.

These are some of the key findings of the Report Card on the Performance of Information Commissions in India, 2020, which was released on Monday on the occasion of 15 years of implementation of the RTI Act.

According to the report, as many as nine of the 29 information commissions or 31 per cent of the appellate bodies—the Central Information Commission and state information commissions of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Goa, Manipur, Telangana, Jharkhand, Tripura and Nagaland—are without a chief commissioner. Two state commissions—Jharkhand and Tripura—have no commissioners.

As per the report compiled by Satark Nagrik Sangathan, the number of appeals and complaints pending on July 31, 2020, in the 20 information commissions from which data was obtained stood at 2,21,568, and the backlog has been steadily increasing.

As many as 1,78,749 appeals and complaints were registered between April 1, 2019, and July 31, 2020, and 1,92,872 cases were disposed, it said.

The report calculates the estimated time each commission would need to dispose of a new appeal or complaint. The Odisha SIC would take seven years and eight months to dispose a matter. In Jharkhand SIC, it would take four years and one month, while in Maharashtra, CIC, Rajasthan and Nagaland, it would take two years or more. The assessment shows that nine commissions would take more than one year to dispose a matter.

 It was also found that penalty was imposed in just 2.2 per cent of the cases disposed by information commissions.