Arguing before a Supreme Court bench on controversial appointment of information commissioners, petitioners Anjali Bhardwaj, Lokesh Batra and Amrita Johri have argued that the “Government of India and state governments have attempted to stifle the functioning of the Right to Information (RTI) Act by failing to do their statutory duty of ensuring appointment of commissioners in the Central Information Commission and State Information Commissions, in a timely manner”.
Repre
Heard by the apex court bench consisting of Justices AK Sikri, S Abdul Nazeer and MR Shah, the petitioners pointed that the appointment process of information commissioners to the Central Information Commission had happened in an arbitrary manner, as the search committee had, in violation of its mandate, short-listed persons who had not even applied for the post in response to advertisements.
The petition further said, the minutes of the search committee revealed that no rational criteria was adopted on the basis of which the short-listing was done. Also, the minutes showed the completely ad-hoc manner of functioning of the search committee, wherein people who were appointed members of the committee, also applied for the post and had to be subsequently replaced and were finally even short-listed. One of the persons who has been appointed, Suresh Chandra, had not even applied for the post.
The petitioners
The court directed that the petitioner should file a reply and the government should also file a report on all the issues and listed the matter for January 29, 2019. All the states were also directed to file their reports before the hearing.
January 26, 2019 at 9:21 pm
The basic information under right to information act is not being given due to fear of exposing negative results