The Telangana State Information Commission (TSIC) has revealed that there are 12,128 cases pending in the commission as of December 31,2023. According to the information sought through RTI by M Padmanabha Reddy, President of the Forum for Good Governance (FEG),a non-governmental organisation, a significant backlog has been accumulating since 2021. The TSIC data reveals that 7,537 appeals and 4591 complaints are pending from 2017 to 2023.
The TSIC has not been reconstituted since February 26, 2022, leading to a delay in processing Right to Information (RTI) appeals and complaints. In 2021, there were 1,138 appeals, which increased to 2,715 in 2022. In 2023 alone, there were 3,528 appeals.
According to Hyderabad based RTI activist Robin Zaccheus, the information remained inactive during the former Bharat Rashtra Samithi government. “The large backlog of pending appeals is expected. The former government did not constitute the body as it never wanted the commission to exist in the first place,” he alleged.
Earlier in December 2023, the newly formed Congress government had sought six weeks' time in the High Court to form the committee that was in charge of selecting the chief information commissioner and the other six information commissioners for the Information Commission. The request was made during the hearing of public interest litigation (PIL) filed by FEG earlier in 2023.