Former law secretary Raj Kumar Goyal likely to be appointed as Chief Information Commissioner

New Delhi: Former Law Secretary Raj Kumar Goyal is likely to be appointed as the Chief Information Commissioner while eight others, most of them former civil servants, are being appointed as Information Commissioners, sources said on Saturday.

With this, the 11-member Central Information Commission will acquire full strength for the first time in the past around seven years. The central transparency panel has been headless since September and has been working with just two Information Commissioners Anandi Ramalingam and Vinod Kumar Tiwari.

The filling of vacancies came after a meeting of the Selection Committee headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah and Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi as members. At the meeting, Rahul has submitted a dissent note claiming that there is no proper representation of "Bahujans", a claim rebutted by the government.

Goyal will be succeeding Heeralal Samariya, the first Dalit chief of CIC. With the exit of Samariya, who was appointed Chief Information Commissioner on 6 November, 2023, retired on September 13 as he completed 65 years of age, the CIC became headless for the seventh time in 11 years with the government failing to find a successor.

The new Information Commissioners include former Railway Board Chairman Jaya Varma Sinha and Sudha Rani Relangi, who was a member of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board. With their appointment, the panel will have three women members.

Former Social Justice and Empowerment Secretary Surendra Singh Meena, former Indian Forest Service officer Khushwant Singh Sethi, former IPS officer who worked in Ministry of Home Affairs and Intelligence Bureau Swagat Das, former IAS officer Sanjeev Kumar Jindal, senior journalist PR Ramesh and Ashutlosh Chaturvedi are the other new members in CIC.

The notification for appointments is likely to be issued soon.

More than half of the new appointees are former bureaucrats. A study on central and state information commissions by Satark Nagrik Sangathan had shown that merely 9% of all information commissioners across the country have been women while retired government officials dominate such postings cornering nearly 58% of the total appointments.