Heeralal Samariya sworn in as Chief Information Commissioner

New Delhi: Heeralal Samariya, a former IAS officer who was serving as Information Commissioner, was on Monday appointed as the head of Central Information Commission, which was headless for the past over a month.

Two Information Commissioners -- former Chairman and Managing Director of Bharat Electronics Ltd Anandi Ramalingam and former Indian Forest Services (IoFS) officer Vinod Kumar Tiwari -- were also inducted into the CIC along with Samariya, who will be the first Dalit Chief Information Commissioner of the country.

However, the appointment of just three in the CIC, which can have a maximum of 11 members, has not gone down well with transparency activists, who said the government did not display political will to strengthen the Right to Information (RTI) regime.

If the fresh appointments were not made on Monday, the CIC would have become defunct as Information Commissioners -- Samariya, Uday Mahurkar and Saroj Punhani -- completed their tenures.

A 1985-batch IAS officer of Telangana cadre and hailing from Rajasthan, Samariya had retired after serving as the Labour Secretary. Initially appointed as an Information Commissioner on 7 November, 2020, he succeeded Y K Sinha, who had retired on October 3.

Samariya was sworn in as CIC by President Droupadi Murmu in Rashtrapati Bhavan while the ICs took oath before the new CIC.

The appointments came days after the Supreme Court asked the union and state governments to take steps to fill the post, as it pointed out that the Right to Information Act would become a "dead letter", while hearing a petition filed by transparency activists Anjali Bhardwaj, Amrita Johri and Commodore Lokesh Batra (retired).

Bhardwaj told DH that the government has not listened to the Supreme Court despite it categorically asking it to fill the vacancies.

"Vacancies really compromise the functioning of the CIC as the backlog will increase and people who want to be heard will not get an opportunity. It undermines the transparency regime and is a clear violation of Supreme Court directions. Since 2014 after Narendra Modi assumed power, we have had to approach the Supreme Court every time to fill a vacancy," she said.

Commenting on the CIC functioning with just three members, Johri said this is "woefully inadequate" and warned that it will lead to further build up of backlog and increase the time it takes for appeals and complaints to be heard. Batra too echoed these remarks and said why appointments could not be made when the government knew about vacancies arising in advance.