With 9 appointments, Central Information Commission back at full strength

New Delhi: Former law secretary Raj Kumar Goyal has been appointed the head of the Central Information Commission (CIC), while eight others — most of them former civil servants — were chosen as information commissioners.

With this, the 11-member CIC acquired full strength for the first time in the past 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.

Goyal will take oath as the chief information commissioner at 11 am (CIC) on Monday. President Droupadi Murmu will administer the oath to Goyal, who will later administer the oath to the eight new information commissioners.

The filling of the vacancies came after a meeting of the Selection Committee headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which also has Home Minister Amit Shah and Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi as members.

At the meeting, Rahul submitted a dissent note claiming that there was no proper representation of "Bahujans", a claim rebutted by the government.

Goyal will be succeeding Heeralal Samariya, the first Dalit chief of the CIC. With the exit of Samariya — who was appointed chief information commissioner on November 6, 2023 — on September 13 as he completed 65 years of age, the CIC became headless for the seventh time in 11 years.

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 P R Ramesh, and Ashutlosh Chaturvedi are the other new members in the CIC.

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 had been women, while retired government officials dominated such postings, cornering nearly 58% of the total appointments.