The 100-odd last-minute amendments that were made to the Right to Information Bill have landed the Centre and states in a fix.
Once the Bill that was passed last month receives the President’s assent, the Centre and states will have to create within three months about 40 posts of the level of Supreme Court judges and 300 posts of the level of chief secretaries.
This is because the Bill requires both the Centre and states to set up Information Commissions comprising up to 11 members, that too of the stipulated level.
The salaries and allowances payable to and other terms and conditions of service of’’ members of Central Information Commission will be the same as those of an election commissioner, which in turn are the same as those of a Supreme Court judge.
When it comes to the State Information Commissions, the chairman will be of the level of a Supreme Court judge while the members will be of the level of chief secretaries.
But the Bill that was proposed by the National Advisory Council had envisaged only one commission with appellate jurisdiction over applications seeking information from the Centre as well as states. And the Bill that was originally introduced in Parliament too provided for a solitary commission.
The proliferation of appellate bodies (and the accompanying high-level posts) is only one of the several anomalies that have arisen because of the amendments that were hurriedly grafted into the Bill just before it was passed in quick succession in the two Houses on May 11 and 12.
Another major anomaly is at the bottom of the enormous hierarchy of public information officers that will have to be appointed by all public authorities’’ which are broadly defined to include all Central and state departments, PSUs, public utililities and even NGOs that are substantially public funded.
The Bill mandates that every’’ public authority should have an assistant public information officer at each sub-divisional level,’’ which is a cluster of villlages. This means there will have have to be over 200 such information officers in every sub-division–way beyond the load of work involved at that level.
The changes made in the penalty clause will have equally odd repercussions. The penalty is the same regardless of the nature of the offence committed by the officer concerned. And that penalty is a fine of Rs 250 for each day till application is received or information is furnished.’’
But then the notion of determining the quantum of penalty on the basis of time would make sense only when the offending officer is guilty of refusing to receive an application or delaying information. Defying logic, the Bill imposes the same kind of Rs 250-per-day penalty even in cases where the officer has destroyed documents or given false information.
