New Delhi, Oct 11 (PTI) It will take 24 years and one month to get an appeal or complaint disposed of by the West Bengal Information Commission if the present rate of disposal and pending cases are taken into consideration, an RTI advocacy group said in its report on Wednesday.

In its report that analysed the working of the Central Information Commission and State Information Commissions and was published on the eve of the 18th anniversary of the Right to Information Act, Satark Nagrik Sangathan said that 10 commissions would take one year or more to dispose of a matter.

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"Using the average monthly disposal rate and the pendency in commissions, the time it would take for an appeal/complaint to be disposed of was computed. The assessment shows that West Bengal SIC would take an estimated 24 years and one month to dispose of a matter. A matter filed on July 1, 2023, would be disposed of in the year 2047 at the current monthly rate of disposal!

"In Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra SICs, estimated time for disposal is more than 4 years and in Odisha and Arunachal Pradesh more than two years," it said.

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The report said four State Information Commissions -- Jharkhand, Telangana, Mizoram and Tripura -- are completely defunct as no new commissioners have been appointed upon the incumbents demitting office.

The group said six commissions -- the Central Information Commission and SICs of Manipur, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Bihar and Punjab -- are currently without a head.

The report said the backlog of complaints and appeals is steadily increasing in the transparency panels, with over 3.21 lakh cases pending on June 30, 2023, in the 27 information commissions from which data was obtained.

"The analysis of penalties imposed by information commissions shows that the commissions did not impose penalties in 91 per cent of the cases where penalties were potentially imposable," it said.

It said 19 out of 29 Information Commissions, or 66 per cent, have not even published their annual report for 2021-22, which is a mandatory exercise under the law.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)