India to Have a Full Information Commission After Nine Years
New Delhi: For the first time in over nine years – the majority of the term of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government in power – the Central Information Commission is set to have a full strength of its members.
A panel headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi recommended the appointment of a new Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) and eight Information Commissioners, at a meeting held on December 10.
Accordingly, President Draupadi Murmu administered the oath to Raj Kumar Goyal, a former AGMUT-cadre bureaucrat, as the CIC on Monday, December 15, 2025. The post had been vacant for three months since the superannuation of Heerala Samaria.
AGMUT refers to Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram-Union Territories cadre of Indian administrative services, as part of which Goyal served at the Union and in states. He retired as Secretary of the Department of Justice in August this year. He was previously Secretary, Border Management, in the Union home ministry, and has served in Jammu and Kashmir as well.
At present, the Central Information Commission has only two of (a maximum of) ten information commissioners.
Former Railway Board Chairman Jaya Verma Sinha, former Indian Police Service officer Swagat Das, who was in the Intelligence Bureau, Union home ministry and Cabinet Secretariat, former Central Secretariat Service officer Sanjeev Kumar Jindal, another former IAS officer Surendra Singh Meena and former Indian Forest Service officer Khushwant Singh Sethi have been recommended for appointment as Information Commissioners, a Hindu report said on Monday.
A former director of prosecution at the Central Bureau of Investigation, Sudha Rani Relangi, who also served as Joint Secretary and Legislative Counsel in the Ministry of Law and Justice, is another information commissioner cleared by the Modi-led panel.
P.R. Ramesh, a journalist and managing editor of Open Magazine, and Ashutosh Chaturvedi, editor-in-chief, Prabhat Khabar, have also been cleared as the next Information Commissioners.
The panel that selected the CIC and the Information Commissioners included the Prime Minister, Home Minister Amit Shah and Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of Opposition (LoP) in Lok Sabha. Under the Right to Information Act, 2005 – the primary law that governs the Information Commissioners and CIC – the Prime Minister chooses the Union minister who is to serve on the selection panel along with himself and the LoP.
Gandhi objected to the composition of the members cleared by the panel, saying it was not representative of India's diversity and did not include any Bahujan members. He recorded his dissent in a note to the selection panel.
The previous CIC, Samariya, is a Dalit, and superannuated on reaching the age of 65. The information panels across the country and in New Delhi have low representation of women as well.
As per the rules, Goyal will administer the oath to the new Information Commissioners once he joins office. Thereafter, the Central Information Commission will return to its full strength of 11, including the CIC.
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