The Centre informed the Supreme Court on Monday that the high-powered selection panel, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, will meet on December 10 to appoint the new Central Information Commissioner.
Besides Modi, the leader of the Opposition and a cabinet minister appointed by the Prime Minister, constituting the selection committee, will pick the next CIC chief, additional solicitor-general K.M. Natraj told a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi. The bench recorded the government’s senior law officer’s submission and deferred the matter by two weeks.
The court was dealing with a joint petition — filed by RTI activists Anjali Bhardwaj, Commodore Lokesh Batra (Retd) and Amrita Johri — alleging large-scale vacancies of various posts in the Central Information Commission (CIC) and the State Information Commissions (SICs), thus frustrating the objective of the Right to Information Act, 2005.
During the brief hearing, advocates Prashant Bhushan and Rahul Gupta representing the petitioners complained that despite earlier directions of the court, vacant posts in the CIC have not been filled.
Bhushan pointed out that the CIC has been without a chief information commissioner since September 14, 2025, and out of the 10 posts of information commissioners, eight are vacant. The backlog of cases at the CIC now stands at 30,134.
According to the counsel, in states too, despite large backlogs, several posts of commissioners are vacant. The Jharkhand and Himachal Pradesh SICs are defunct — with all posts of commissioners, including that of the chief, lying vacant.
The top court also gave directions to all the chief secretaries of the states to file affidavits indicating the number of sanctioned posts in the respective SICs, the number of vacant posts and the backlog of appeals and complaints.