23,000 appeals pending before Central Information Commission

Chennai:

Lack of adequate staff has hit the Central Information Commission resulting in 23,000 Right to Information pending appeals, according to Chief Information Commissioner Satyanand Mishra.

Speaking to reporters after inaugurating a two-day workshop on ‘Right to information Act 2005’, which is jointly organized by Institute of Public Enterprise and Neyveli Lignite Corporation here on Friday, Mishra said the Central Information Commission (CIC) has only six commissioners against the required strength of 11 and it is crippling the functioning of CIC.

“Currently, each commissioner is clearing 300 appeals a month which works out to 1,800 appeals a month as against the input of 2,300 cases a month,” Mishra said.

“If we had adequate staff, we will be clearing about 3,500 appeals a month and this will reduce the pending appeals,’ he added.

“We want the appeals to be decided within three months but due to shortage of staff and pending appeals, cases are taking about eight to 10 months to be decided,” Mishra said.

To a query on the recent directive by Central Information Commission to President's Secretariat to disclose details of correspondence among various ministries and the Delhi Police related to black money, he said the correspondence has been made public but the information seeker has not come back to us in this regard.

Mishra also said none of the public sectors or the bank agencies have made pro-active disclosures which is mandatory under section 4 (1)b of RTI act since the act cme into being in 2005.

Interestingly, CIC also has started uploading the pending complaints. “We have started uploading the position of pendency of the appeals every month in the website. Other Commissioners will be doing so soon,” he added.

He also said the Commission has urged the High Courts in the country to disclose information they possess and Guwahati High Court has been the first to do so.

The commission has till now received over 1 million RTI applications and this is very less when compared to the RTI applications received in United States. Last year, the Commission received over 25,000 second appeals, he added.