At a time when transparency and access to information have emerged as prerequisites of good governance, there are over 36000 pending Right to Information (RTI) queries pending at the Central Information Commission (CIC), which has been functioning without a Chief Information Commissioner for almost four months now.
According to information furnished by the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), 203 people, including all seven serving Information Commissioners and a former DoPT secretary, have applied for the top post, lying vacant since 22nd August.
The information was provided to Commodore (retired) Lokesh Batra in response to a RTI query.
The query also revealed that the number of pending cases in the CIC bench increased by 47 per cent, from 7655 to 11212, in the four months since the retirement of the last CIC Rajiv Mathur.
The government had invited applications for the post of CIC on 24th October. The last date for application was 23rd November.
As on January 4th, there were 36,319 pending cases before the Central Information Commission. The bulk of these — 28,888 to be precise — were appeals while the rest (7,431) were complaints.
According to the monthly progress reports put up by the CIC on its website, Vijay Sharma, at 5971, had the most pending cases (complaints and appeals) among the seven information commissioners, followed by Yashovardhan Azad at 4902 and Sharat Sabharwal at 3999.
Manjula Prasher, the only woman member of the commission, had 3418 pending cases while Basant Seth, MA Khan Yusufi, and M.S. Acharyulu had 3408, 1491 and 1772 pending cases, respectively.
When it came to disposing off applications in 2014, Mr. Acharyulu was at the top with resolution of 2891 RTI applications.
He was followed by Mr. Sharma at 2660, Mr. Seth at 2351, Mr. Azad at 2202, Mr. Sabharwal at 2183, Ms. Prasher at 2036 and Mr. Yusufi at 1713.
For the Chief Information Commissioner, the monthly progress reports shows zero cases disposed against 11317 pending complaints for the entire last year, which is interesting considering CIC Rajiv Mathur held the post till August 2014, after which it fell vacant.
