CIC sent two letters to PM to fill posts

Said if pendency continues,it may spell doom for RTI mechanism

The government may have issued an advertisement for the post of information commissioners at the Central Information Commission in November but the move comes after repeated distress calls from Chief Information Commissioner Satyananda Mishra to the Prime Ministers Office to urgently fill up the growing number of vacancies at the top transparency panel.

An RTI response from the Commission shows that two successive letters written by Mishra in June and July had warned the PMO that the Central Information Commission (CIC) was groaning under workload even as vacancies for information commissioners remain. There are presently six information commissioners,including Mishra,at the CIC. This state of affairs,if it continues,may spell doom for the RTI mechanism in India,Mishra had warned in one of the letters.

The letters were released by the CIC in response to an RTI request by a Varanasi resident.

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Speaking to The Indian Express,Mishra confirmed about the advertisement on November 18 and said that the government may presumably be processing the applications received.

Asked if there was any response to his letters from the PMO,Mishra simply said,There was no reply.

In his June 2 letter,Mishra wrote to former principal secretary to the Prime Minister,T K A Nair,saying that for some time now,I have been writing about the large number of vacancies in the Central Information Commission. Since A N Tiwari demitted office in December 2010,five posts of Information Commissioners continue to remain vacant.

The CIC,Mishra emphasised,was finding it hard to match up with the workload of cases with the current number of information commissioners.

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Though the panel manages to dispose off more than 300 cases a month,the pendency exceeding 17,000 cases chokes the CIC,Mishra wrote in June.

In his second letter on July 20,Mishra,appears to be more blunt. Reason: The CICs pendency has climbed from 17,000 to over 19,000 by the end of June the month he wrote the first letter to PMO itself.

We have five vacancies in the Commission at present. The last time any information commissioner was appointed to the CIC was on September 23,2009….One more vacancy will be caused in July 2012 when Shailesh Gandhi would retire,taking the total number of vacancies to six, he points out.

If this continues,he says,the pendency by the end of 2011 will exceed 21,000 and a citizen will have to wait for a year to have his case heard at the CIC.

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