New Delhi: Hearings conducted by the State Information Commissions (SIC) dropped from 80 per cent in June to 44 per cent in July when Unlock 2.0 had begun, found a survey conducted by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI).
“We found, out of the 29 Information Commissions, nearly 80% (23 Commissions) had resumed hearings during Unlock 1.0 starting on 1st June, 2020,” said the CHRI report, which was published this week on 17 August.
CHRI is an organisation that works toward developing greater accountability and transparency in governance of Commonwealth countries.
The survey was conducted by getting in touch with all SICs across the country via phone calls and by tracking their websites to find out whether local lockdowns have affected functioning.
The first rapid survey in April found that while the Central Information Commission (CIC) had resumed hearings, none of the SICs were working. The second survey in May revealed that 12 SICs had opened their offices but only eight conducted hearings during the third phase of the lockdown, which ended on 17 May.
The third survey, released this week, found out that there has been a drop to 44 per cent in July from 80 per cent in June.
“We continued to track the working of Information Commissions during the Unlock 2.0 phase also as several state governments had imposed local lockdowns to contain the spread of Covid-19. Once again, we surveyed the websites of the SICs and made phone calls to their offices to ascertain whether local lockdowns have affected their work.
“This time we found only 44% Information Commissions under The Right to Information Act, 2005 (RTI Act), i.e., 13 out of 29 Commissions were conducting hearings during Unlock 2.0 starting on 1st July,” the survey said.
Out of these 13 SICs, only 10 conducted hearings via phone or video calls and WhatsApp. Three commissions had opened their offices for the public and attended litigants in person.
Shikha Chhibbar, programme officer, Access to Information, CHRI, noted that commissions needed to address the dilemma between staying open and risking the spread of Covid-19, and remaining closed and not promoting the RTI.
“Our third rapid survey … shows that 80% Information Commissions were open in June during Unlock 1.0 and in July it was down to 44% during Unlock 2.0. This shows that most of the Information Commissions across the States could not put sustainable efforts to perform their role as champions of transparency during lockdowns in their states,” Chhibbar said.
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No chief information officer in 6 SICs
The report also found that six SICs — in Bihar, Goa, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Tripura and Uttar Pradesh — have been functioning without a chief information officer for several months. Moreover, SICs in Bihar and Madhya Pradesh do not have functional websites.
SICs of 16 states didn’t conduct hearings in Unlock 2.0, of which seven of these — Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Odisha and West Bengal — had put notices on their websites stating adjournment of all hearings.
“The other 9 SICs … did not have any information in this regard on their websites,” the CHRI report said.
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