About 11,000 petitions filed under the Right to Information Act are pending and anyone filing a petition now may have to wait for at least two years to get a reply.
The state information commissioner’s office is currently disposing of petitions filed in 2009. At a seminar on the Right to Information Act here on Saturday, several participants complained about the pendency of petitions which was defeating the purpose of filing the RTI plea. “By the time the information is received, the purpose for which it is accessed might not be there,” participants complained. State information commissioner C Madhukar Raj admitted the problem of backlog and said, “When I took charge as commissioner in June 2012, around 11,200 petitions were waiting for disposal.” He urged chief information commissioner Jannat Hussain to clear the cases speedily.
Hussain informed the participants that the pending cases would be resolved soon and that they were clearing urgent petitions filed on a priority basis. Another state information commissioner S Prabhakar Reddy said the pendency would be brought down to three months by June 2013.