“Recent amendments to the Right to Information Act will have profound impact on the autonomy and independence of the Information Commission”. Discuss.

Information Commissions are the appellate spine of the RTI Act, 2005, empowered to direct disclosure and penalise erring officials. The RTI (Amendment) Act, 2019 restructured their service conditions in ways that cut at this independence.

What the amendment changed

• The fixed five-year tenure of the Chief Information Commissioner and Information Commissioners was replaced by a term prescribed by the Central Government — set at three years under the 2019 Rules.
• Salaries and service conditions, earlier pegged to the Chief Election Commissioner and Election Commissioners, are now determined by the Centre.
• The same control extends to State Information Commissioners, letting the Union fix the terms of state-level adjudicators.

Impact on autonomy and independence

• Commissioners now serve on terms revisable by the very executive whose disclosures they adjudicate — inviting a chilling effect on orders against government.
• Downgraded stature weakens their authority to direct senior officials, and centralised rule-making unsettles the federal scheme of the Act.
• It compounds existing infirmities — vacancies and mounting pendency that forced the Supreme Court in Anjali Bhardwaj (2019) to direct timely appointments.

The government defends the change as rationalisation, since parity with a constitutional body was anomalous for a statutory one. But independence is functional, not ornamental: restoring fixed tenure and protected status would re-secure the citizen's right to know.