Recent Amendments and Status of CIC

For its first fourteen years the Central Information Commission (CIC) sat on a statutory pedestal that Parliament itself had built: a fixed five-year tenure, a salary welded to that of the Chief Election Commissioner, and a stature that the Supreme Court repeatedly described as quasi-judicial. The Right to Information (Amendment) Act, 2019 dismantled that pedestal in a single afternoon of debate, handing the Central Government rule-making power over tenure, salary and service conditions of every Information Commissioner in the country. Three years later the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 rewrote Section 8(1)(j), the most litigated exemption in the statute. This chapter maps those changes against the case law, then turns to the uncomfortable present - a Commission running with a fraction of its sanctioned strength, a backlog measured in tens of thousands of appeals, and a Supreme Court that has had to issue direction after direction simply to keep the institution staffed. For the judiciary and CLAT-PG aspirant, this is where the RTI Act stops being a chapter on rights and becomes a study in institutional design.

The Constitutional and Statutory Baseline of the CIC

The Central Information Commission is a creature of statute, not of the Constitution. Section 12 of the Right to Information Act, 2005 directs the Central Government, by notification in the Official Gazette, to constitute a body called the Central Information Commission consisting of the Chief Information Commissioner and such number of Information Commissioners, not exceeding ten, as may be deemed necessary. The general superintendence, direction and management of the Commission vests in the Chief Information Commissioner under Section 12(4). Crucially, Section 12(3) prescribes a high-powered appointing committee: the Prime Minister as chairperson, the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, and a Union Cabinet Minister nominated by the Prime Minister. The deliberate inclusion of the Leader of Opposition was meant to insulate the Commission from being a purely executive nominee body. For the parallel architecture of who can hold information and who must disclose it, see our chapters on definitions of public authority, information and the PIO and the obligations of public authority.

The Commission's eligibility net is deliberately wide. Section 12(5) requires that the Chief Information Commissioner and Information Commissioners be persons of eminence in public life with wide knowledge and experience in law, science and technology, social service, management, journalism, mass media or administration and governance - notably without any mandatory judicial qualification. Section 12(6) bars sitting Members of Parliament or State Legislatures and holders of any other office of profit. This statutory design - eminent generalists rather than judges - became the fault line in the first major constitutional challenge to the Commission's composition.

Namit Sharma and the Question of Judicial Members

The originating skirmish over the CIC's character came in Namit Sharma v. Union of India, (2013) 1 SCC 745. A practising advocate challenged Sections 12 and 15 on the ground that the Commission discharges quasi-judicial functions - deciding appeals, imposing penalties, ordering disclosure - yet could be staffed entirely by non-lawyers with no judicially trained mind. A two-judge Bench agreed in part. In its September 2012 judgment the Court directed that Information Commissions function in benches of two, one of whom must be a judicial member holding a law degree and possessing judicial experience, effectively reading a judicial-member requirement into a statute that contained none.

That direction did not survive. On the Union's review petition, in Union of India v. Namit Sharma, decided 3 September 2013 and reported at (2013) 10 SCC 359, the Supreme Court recalled the earlier directions. The review Bench held that since Sections 12(5) and 15(5) do not provide for judicial members, the court could not legislate one into existence - whether to add judicial members is a matter of policy for Parliament, and the earlier judgment had crossed into the legislative domain. The net effect, which remains the law, is that the CIC is a constitutionally permissible body of eminent generalists; judicial qualification is desirable but not mandatory. Namit Sharma is therefore the doctrinal anchor for understanding why the 2019 amendment - which touched tenure and salary but never composition - left the eligibility architecture untouched.

The Pre-2019 Status: Tenure and Salary Pegged by Statute

To appreciate what the 2019 amendment altered, one must read the original Section 13 carefully. As enacted, Section 13(1) provided that the Chief Information Commissioner shall hold office for a term of five years from the date he enters upon office and shall not be eligible for reappointment, with a hard ceiling that no Chief Information Commissioner shall hold office after attaining the age of sixty-five years. Section 13(2) applied the same five-year-or-65 formula to Information Commissioners, with the rider that an Information Commissioner could be appointed Chief Information Commissioner, subject to the aggregate tenure not exceeding five years.

The financial parity was the politically sensitive part. Section 13(5), as originally enacted, fixed the salaries, allowances and other terms of service of the Chief Information Commissioner as the same as those of the Chief Election Commissioner, and of an Information Commissioner as the same as those of an Election Commissioner. Because the Chief Election Commissioner's salary is by separate statute equated to that of a Judge of the Supreme Court, the CIC sat - by a chain of statutory cross-references - at the salary stature of an apex court judge. Section 16 mirrored this entire scheme for State Information Commissions, with the State Chief Information Commissioner pegged to an Election Commissioner and State Information Commissioners pegged to the Chief Secretary of the State Government. This statutory peg, fixed by Parliament and not alterable by the executive, was the feature the 2019 amendment set out to remove. For the wider context of the rights the Commission exists to enforce, see the right to information.

The RTI (Amendment) Act, 2019: What Changed

The Right to Information (Amendment) Act, 2019 (Act 24 of 2019) received Presidential assent on 1 August 2019. It is a short instrument - three operative amendments - but its constitutional significance is disproportionate to its length. First, it amended Section 13 to delete the fixed five-year term for the Chief Information Commissioner and Information Commissioners and substituted the words "for such term as may be prescribed by the Central Government." Second, it deleted the statutory salary parity with the Chief Election Commissioner and Election Commissioner in Section 13(5) and substituted "such salaries and allowances and other terms and conditions of service as may be prescribed by the Central Government." Third, it made the mirror-image changes to Section 16 for State Information Commissions - and significantly, it is the Central Government, not the State Government, that is empowered to prescribe the terms for State Commissioners.

The amendment did not stop at Sections 13 and 16. It also tightened Section 27, the rule-making provision, to carry the corresponding head of power. The combined effect is that the three load-bearing variables of institutional independence - how long a Commissioner serves, how much she is paid, and on what terms she may be removed from comfort if not from office - migrated from the fixed text of a parliamentary statute into delegated legislation that the executive of the day can revise. Government's stated rationale, recorded in the Statement of Objects and Reasons and reiterated in Parliament, was that the CIC is a statutory body whose status cannot be equated with a constitutional authority like the Election Commission, and that rationalising service conditions through rules was merely a correction of an anomaly.

The Right to Information Rules, 2019: Filling the Blank Cheque

The amendment was a blank cheque; the Right to Information Rules, 2019, notified on 24 October 2019, filled in the amount. Rule 3 fixed the term of office of the Chief Information Commissioner and Information Commissioners at the Centre - and of the State Chief and State Information Commissioners - at three years from the date of entering office, replacing the erstwhile five-year statutory term. The age ceiling of sixty-five years was retained, so the operative tenure is now three years or 65, whichever is earlier. Rule 4 fixed the salary of the Chief Information Commissioner at Rs 2,50,000 per month and of an Information Commissioner at Rs 2,25,000 per month, with corresponding figures for the State Commissions, expressly subject to deduction of pension already drawn by retired-officer appointees.

Critics, including the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and several former Commissioners, argued that fixing salary by rule rather than statute - and reserving to the Centre the power to revise it - converts an independent watchdog into an authority whose pay and tenure are at executive sufferance, undermining the bargaining power that a fixed statutory term confers. The counter-argument is that the figures the Rules adopted in fact preserved the rupee value of the old CEC-linked salary, so the practical impact on incumbents was minimal. The constitutional objection, however, is not about the quantum but about the locus of the power - and that objection is now pending before the Supreme Court.

The Independence Debate and the Pending Challenge

The independence critique of the 2019 framework rests on an analogy the Government itself rejects: that an Information Commission, although statutory, performs adjudicatory functions and should enjoy the structural insulation that the Supreme Court has demanded for tribunals. In the tribunal jurisprudence - from L. Chandra Kumar v. Union of India, (1997) 3 SCC 261, through the National Tax Tribunal and Madras Bar Association lines of cases - the Court has held that security of tenure and conditions of service are integral to the independence of an adjudicatory body, and that excessive executive control over those conditions is constitutionally suspect. RTI activists argue that delegating tenure and salary of a quasi-judicial Commission to executive rule-making violates this principle and offends the basic structure value of an informed citizenry recognised in Union of India v. Association for Democratic Reforms, (2002) 5 SCC 294.

A writ petition challenging the constitutional validity of the 2019 amendment and the 2019 Rules is pending before the Supreme Court. As of the date of writing the amendment remains in force and unstayed; no judgment striking it down has been delivered. For exam purposes the safe statement is that the validity is sub judice, and a candidate should present the independence argument as a contention, not as settled law. The doctrinal hook to remember is the gap the amendment exploits: the CIC is statutory, not constitutional, so the strict Anjali Bhardwaj-style parity reasoning does not automatically immunise its service conditions from legislative change.

Anjali Bhardwaj and the War on Vacancies

If the 2019 amendment was about the terms of office, Anjali Bhardwaj v. Union of India, decided on 15 February 2019, was about whether the offices would be filled at all. In a PIL under Article 32, RTI activists documented chronic vacancies crippling the CIC and several State Commissions, leaving the institutions to function below strength with mounting backlogs. A Bench of Justices A.K. Sikri and S. Abdul Nazeer issued a detailed set of directions that remain the governing template for appointments.

The Court held, first, that the appointment process should be initiated one to two months before a vacancy is due to arise, so that the post is filled the moment it falls vacant. Second, it directed transparency in selection: the Search Committee's composition and the criteria for shortlisting must be placed in the public domain, and the particulars of applicants and shortlisted candidates be disclosed on the website. Third, it underscored that the Chief Information Commissioner and Information Commissioners are to be drawn from diverse fields and not predominantly from the bureaucracy, giving teeth to the "eminence in public life" language of Section 12(5). The judgment expressly reaffirmed that the terms and conditions then applicable matched those of the Chief Election Commissioner and Election Commissioners - a finding rendered partly academic five months later by the amendment, but doctrinally important as a marker of the pre-amendment baseline.

Continuing Mandamus: Keeping the Commission Staffed

The directions in Anjali Bhardwaj did not end the litigation; they began a phase of continuing mandamus. The petitioners returned repeatedly to enforce compliance, and the Supreme Court has treated persistent vacancies as a near-contempt of its 2019 mandate. On 30 October 2023 a Bench led by Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud expressed sharp dissatisfaction at the Union's and States' failure to fill posts, observing that an unstaffed Commission renders the RTI Act a dead letter. On 26 November 2024 a Bench of Justices Surya Kant and Ujjal Bhuyan directed the Union and the States to file affidavits disclosing the number of vacancies in the CIC and the State Commissions and the timelines proposed for filling them.

The Court has, however, declined to micro-manage every step. In the same proceedings it refused a prayer to compel disclosure of the names of shortlisted candidates for the CIC, recording that it had no reason to doubt the Union's bona fides on that narrow point - a reminder that the judicial pressure is directed at the fact of vacancy, not at second-guessing the merits of individual selections. The cumulative message of this line of orders is unambiguous: the constitutional value the Court is protecting is the citizen's right to a functioning appellate forum, and structural starvation of the Commission is treated as a justiciable failure.

The Present Status of the CIC: Strength and Backlog

The lived reality of the Commission in 2025-26 illustrates why the vacancy litigation persists. Against a sanctioned strength of one Chief Information Commissioner and up to ten Information Commissioners, the CIC has for extended stretches functioned with a small fraction of that complement, at times reduced to a handful of Commissioners while the remaining posts - including, at points, the office of the Chief itself - lay vacant. The post of Chief Information Commissioner fell vacant on the demitting of office of Heeralal Samariya, and the leadership of the Commission has subsequently changed hands, with the appointment of a new Chief Information Commissioner restoring the office.

The backlog is the visible symptom. Pendency at the CIC has run into the tens of thousands of matters - second appeals under Section 19(3) and complaints under Section 18 combined - a figure that translates into multi-year waits for an aggrieved applicant to obtain a final decision. When a citizen's request is rejected by the Public Information Officer and the first appeal fails, the second appeal to the Commission is the last administrative forum before constitutional remedies; a clogged Commission therefore defeats the statute's promise of timely access. The procedural machinery that feeds the Commission is discussed in our chapters on designation of Public Information Officers and requests for obtaining information.

The Commission's Powers: What the Amendments Did Not Touch

It is as important to know what the 2019 amendment left intact as what it changed. The Commission's adjudicatory powers under Sections 18, 19 and 20 were untouched. Section 18 confers on the Commission the power to receive and inquire into complaints, with the powers of a civil court under the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 - summoning witnesses, requiring discovery, receiving evidence on affidavit. Section 19(3) makes the Commission the second appellate authority, and Section 19(8) empowers it to require the public authority to take steps to secure compliance, including providing access in a particular form, appointing PIOs, and awarding compensation to the complainant for any loss or detriment suffered.

The penal teeth in Section 20 also survived: where the PIO has, without reasonable cause, refused to receive an application, delayed disclosure, denied a request malafidely or destroyed information, the Commission may impose a penalty of two hundred and fifty rupees per day up to a ceiling of twenty-five thousand rupees, and may recommend disciplinary action. The 2019 amendment thus left the Commission's functional jurisdiction fully armed; what it altered was the structural security of the persons who wield that jurisdiction. The distinction is examinable: a question that asks "what did the 2019 amendment change" is answered by tenure, salary and rule-making - not by powers.

The DPDP Act, 2023 and the Rewriting of Section 8(1)(j)

The second major recent change came from outside the RTI statute altogether. Section 44(3) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 amended Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act. As originally enacted, Section 8(1)(j) exempted personal information the disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or interest, or which would cause unwarranted invasion of privacy - but with a vital proviso: information that cannot be denied to Parliament or a State Legislature shall not be denied to any person, and the PIO could still order disclosure if satisfied that the larger public interest justified it. The amendment substitutes a terse clause exempting "information which relates to personal information," stripping out both the public-interest balancing test and the Parliament-parity proviso.

The change is doctrinally seismic because Section 8(1)(j) was the single most invoked exemption in RTI practice, and the Supreme Court in CPIO, Supreme Court of India v. Subhash Chandra Agarwal, (2020) 5 SCC 481, had built an entire balancing jurisprudence on the old text - holding that the office of the Chief Justice of India is a public authority and that disclosure of judges' assets turns on weighing public interest against privacy under the proviso. By deleting the proviso, the amendment removes the very fulcrum on which that balancing rested. The provision has not yet been notified into force as of writing, and over 120 Members of Parliament have petitioned for its repeal; its operation, and its compatibility with the privacy-transparency balance struck in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1, is among the most live controversies in the field.

Exam Perspective and Synthesis

For the judiciary and CLAT-PG candidate, the topic resolves into four clean threads. One: composition - the CIC is a statutory body of eminent generalists; Namit Sharma (2013) and its review settle that judicial members are not mandatory and that a court cannot read them in. Two: terms of office - the 2019 amendment shifted tenure (now three years under Rule 3 of the 2019 Rules), salary and service conditions from fixed statute to Central Government rules, with the validity sub judice; know the pre-amendment baseline (five years; CEC parity) and the post-amendment position cold. Three: vacancies and enforcement - Anjali Bhardwaj (2019) is the leading authority, with its directions on advance initiation, transparency in selection and diversity of background, reinforced by continuing Supreme Court orders through 2023-24. Four: exemptions - the DPDP Act 2023, Section 44(3), recasts Section 8(1)(j) by deleting the public-interest proviso, casting doubt on the Subhash Chandra Agarwal balancing model.

The unifying analytical point - the one that distinguishes a top answer - is that recent reform has run in two opposite directions at once. Legislatively, the executive has gained ground: control over tenure and pay through the 2019 amendment, and a wider privacy shield through the DPDP recast of Section 8(1)(j). Judicially, the Supreme Court has pushed the other way, treating chronic vacancies as a justiciable defeat of the citizen's right and policing the appointment process. To round out the scheme of the Act and its object, revisit our chapters on the introduction, object and scheme and the right to information, or return to the RTI Act notes hub for the full sequence.