Context- Recently  Supreme Court ruled that the office of the Chief Justice of India (CJI) is a public authority under the Right to Information (RTI) Act.

• A five-judge Constitution Bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, and including Justices N V Ramana, D Y Chandrachud, Deepak Gupta, and Sanjiv Khanna, upheld a Delhi High Court ruling of 2010, and dismissed three appeals filed by the Secretary General and the Central Public Information Officer (CPIO) of the Supreme Court

Background

• It all started in 2009 with an RTI application filed by the well-known activist Subhash Chandra Agrawal with the apex court’s Central Public Information Officer (CPIO).
• Agrawal sought disclosure of the SC collegium’s notes about the appointments of three SC judges: justices R.M. Lodha, H.L. Dattu and A.K. Ganguly.

Why did Agrawal choose these three judges for scrutiny?

• It was reported at the time that Lodha and Dattu had been elevated, superseding the all-India seniority of other high court judges who had become eligible for appointment as SC judges before them under the informal system.
• Lodha and Dattu (and Ganguly) were appointed on the same day: 17 December 2008.
• Therefore, Agrawal was curious to know whether the collegium had emphasized merit over seniority, because Dattu, Ganguly and Lodha were at the time more junior than the then Delhi high court chief justice, A.P. Shah, and justices A.K. Patnaik and V.K. Gupta.

So, what happened to his RTI request with the apex court?

• Both the CPIO and the Appellate Authority of the SC rejected his request under the RTI Act, and he then filed his appeal with the RTI ombudsman, the Central Information Commission (CIC). The CIC allowed the appeal.
• In 2009, the SC registry first lost its appeal against a CIC decision ordering disclosure of judges’ assets, before a single judge of the Delhi high court.
• And in 2010, it lost again before a three-judge bench of the Delhi high court.
• The high court held that the apex court was bound to disclose information about the assets of the judges.
• The SC then began to disclose information about the assets of judges, claiming it did so purely on a voluntary basis

What the order means

• The outcome is that the office of the CJI will now entertain RTI applications.
• Under Section 2(f) of the RTI Act, information means “any material in any form, including records, documents, memos, e-mails, opinions, advices, press releases, circulars, orders, logbooks, contracts, reports, papers, samples, models, data material held in any electronic form and information relating to any private body which can be accessed by a public authority under any other law for the time being in force”.
• Whether a public authority discloses the information sought or not, however, is a different matter.
• Offices such as those of the Prime Minister and the President too are public authorities under the RTI Act.
• But public authorities have often denied information quoting separate observations by the Supreme Court itself in 2011: “Officials need to furnish only such information which already exists and is held by the public authority and not collate or create information”; and, “the nation does not want a scenario where 75% of the staff of public authorities spends 75% of their time in collecting and furnishing information to applicants instead of discharging their regular duties”.

CBI is still out of RTI

• While the office of the CJI is now under the RTI’s ambit, the CBI is exempt.
• When the UPA government brought the RTI law on October 12, 2005, the CBI was under it.
• The agency later moved for exemption, and this file was endorsed by Law Minister M Veerappa Moily of the UPA government itself.
• Incidentally, the Administrative Reforms Commission chaired by Moily had earlier recommended exemption of the armed forces from the RTI Act, but had not made such a recommendation for the CBI.

While the CBI demanded exemption only for units in intelligence gathering, exemption was granted in 2011 to the agency as a whole. The CBI, which is an agency that is often engaged in investigation of corruption cases, is today included in a list of exempted organisations in which most of the others are engaged in intelligence gathering. Litigation challenging the decision to exempt the CBI is pending with the Supreme Court; the next date of hearing, however, has not been fixed