The criticism that CIC has turned into a retirement hub for babus may not be completely misplaced as 12 then secretaries of the Union government, including the Chairman of UPSC, had applied for Chief Information Commissioner and Information Commissioners' posts at the transparency panel.
One of them, PK Malhotra, was also on the search panel, which was reconstituted after his candidature came to light, file notings released under the RTI Act to Commodore (retd) Lokesh Batra show.
In the list were the then secretaries of Security, Cabinet Secretariat (DP Sinha), Space, Atomic Energy, Earth Sciences (S Srinivasan), Textiles (Sanjay Kumar Panda), Chemicals and Petrochemicals (Surijit K Choudhary), Department of Persons with Disabilities (Lov Verma), Chairman UPSC (Amitava Bhattachararyya), Parliamentary Affairs (Ranglal Jamuda), Social Justice and Empowerment (Anita Agnihotri), Housing (Nandita Chatterjee), Secretary UPSC (Ashim Khurana), MSME (Anup Pujari) and Legal Affairs (PK Malhotra).
Delhi Police Commissioner Bhim Sain Bassi, along with five other bureaucrats, was shortlisted for the Central Information Commission with the condition that they will be considered only if senior-most Information Commissioner Basant Seth is elevated as the panel's chief.
The file notings vis-a-vis the selection of Chief Information Commissioner, made public today under the RTI Act, show that 12 people applied for the post of Chief Information Commissioner, 157 for Information Commissioner and 173 for both the CIC and IC.
The search committee, headed by Cabinet Secretary PK Sinha, trimmed the list down to three candidates -- RK Mathur, Arun Mishra and Basant Seth -- for the post of Chief Information Commissioner while six were shortlisted for the post of Information Commissioners.
Besides Bassi, those shortlisted for the post of Information Commissioners included former Information and Broadcasting Secretary Bimal Julka, former Deputy Comptroller and Auditor General Vijaya Moorthy, the then secretary MSME Anup K Pujari, former Secretary, DoPT, SK Sarkar and former Gujarat High Court judge Ravi R Tripathi.
The records released to Batra show the Committee noted that those shortlisted for the post of Information Commissioner may be considered in case sitting Information Commissioner Basant Seth is elevated as Chief Information Commissioner.
According to the RTI Act, the Commission can have one Chief Information Commissioner and 10 Information Commissioners. The search was being made as the then CIC Vijai Sharma was about to retire. When the search was undertaken, CIC had seven Information Commissioners, including Seth.
Mathur was selected as Chief Information Commissioner and no Information Commissioner was appointed, it said.
The search committee was also reconstituted a number of times: once when Sunil Arora, the then Secretary Information and Broadcasting, recused himself and, later, after it emerged that PK Malhotra, the then Law Secretary who was on the panel, was himself an applicant.
