Appointment in commissions arbitrary, politically motivated: Shailesh Gandhi

Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi has taken a dig at the government for the way commissioners are appointed and his own organization --- the Central Information Commission --- for slow disposal of cases.

Updated on: Jun 2, 2012, 20:18:27 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi has taken a dig at the government for the way commissioners are appointed and his own organization --- the Central Information Commission --- for slow disposal of cases.

Gandhi an IIT Mumbai Alumuni and the only non-bureaucrat in the CIC will retire on July 6. In his five years in the CIC, Gandhi had taken several initiatives in the commission including prescribing minimum limit of 3,500 for each commissioner to dispose cases in a year and citizen charter.

Before parting ways, Gandhi had questioned the way government appoints commissioners in commissions including CIC are appointed and parameters to evaluate their performance. “The way commissioners are appointed is totally arbitrary, politically motivated and non productive,” he told Hindustan Times in an interview.

While there is a process to appoint lower rank officials in these commissions, there is no such system for commissioners. “If there is no accountability these commissions will fail the citizens,” he said.

It truly holds for the CIC, which is mandated to ensure that citizens get information from the government in time. But, Gandhi feels that the present pace of disposal of cases the information commissions will fail to meet expectations of citizens.

“As per my calculation, there will be a backlog of around 80,000 cases in next four to five years. It will mean an appeal is heard after three years and by that time the information would have lost value for the citizen. There is a need to ensure that the citizen gets information fast or else the RTI will die,” he said.

To prevent death of the transparency law, Gandhi suggested that an information commissioner should dispose off 6,000 cases a year --- as compared to existing CIC criteria of 3,200 per year ---- and have people interested in their job to be appointed as commissioners.

He, however, refused to blame retired bureaucrats in the information commissions for slow pace of disposal of cases. “Even journalists in many states have a poor track record,” he said, that information commissions having journalists in Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh is taking years to dispose off the cases.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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