Which of the following statements about the Right to Information Act, 2005 is/are correct? 1. There shall be not more than twelve (12) Information Commissioners. 2. The Chief Information Commissioner shall hold office for a term of five years. 3. The Chief Information Commissioner is eligible for reappointment. Select the correct answer using the code given below:

The Commission dropped this question and credited no option, and the reason becomes plain once each statement is checked against the Act as it stood on the day of the examination. Statement 1 is simply false. Section 12(2) provides that the Central Information Commission shall consist of the Chief Information Commissioner and such number of Central Information Commissioners, not exceeding ten, as may be deemed necessary; the stem prints twelve. Statement 2 was true of the Act as originally enacted, where section 13 fixed a term of five years, but the Right to Information (Amendment) Act, 2019 removed the fixed term and left it to be prescribed by the Central Government, which then prescribed three years. By August 2023 the five-year term had been off the statute book for four years. Statement 3 is false in both versions, because section 13 bars the Chief Information Commissioner from reappointment and the 2019 amendment left that bar untouched. With all three statements failing on the law in force, none of the four offered combinations can be right — every one of them asserts that statement 1 or statement 2 is correct. Only if the paper is read against the un-amended 2005 text does an answer appear at all, and an item that is answerable on a superseded version of a statute is not an item that can be keyed.

• (a)1 only — Rests on statement 1, and the number in statement 1 is wrong. The ceiling is ten Information Commissioners, not twelve.
• (b)2 only — Rests on statement 2, which describes the position before the 2019 amendment. This is the option the item would have had if it had been set on the original text of the Act, which is precisely the ambiguity that sank it.
• (c)1 and 2 only — Combines a statement that has always been false with one that ceased to be true in 2019.
• (d)1, 2 and 3 — Adds statement 3, which is false under the Act both before and after the amendment, since the Chief Information Commissioner has never been eligible for reappointment.

The Right to Information Act, 2005 created a two-tier machinery — a Central Information Commission for central public authorities and a State Information Commission for each State — and set out in sections 12 and 13 how many commissioners there may be, how they are appointed, how long they serve and on what terms. Those are the provisions the three statements are drawn from, and two of the three were rewritten in 2019.

The 2019 amendment is the whole story of this question. As enacted, the Act fixed the tenure of the Chief Information Commissioner and the Information Commissioners at five years and pegged their salaries and service conditions to those of the Chief Election Commissioner and Election Commissioners, which was a deliberate signal of independence. The amendment deleted the fixed term and the salary parity and made both matters for the Central Government to prescribe by rules; the rules made in 2019 set the term at three years. That is why a statement written from a pre-2019 textbook now reads as false, and why a question drawn from such a textbook cannot be keyed against the law of 2023. The examination lesson is a durable one — when a stem quotes a term of office or a numerical ceiling from a statute, check whether the provision has been amended, because current-affairs amendments to well-known Acts are exactly where this kind of item goes wrong.

• Section 12(2) of the Right to Information Act, 2005 caps the Central Information Commission at the Chief Information Commissioner plus not more than ten Information Commissioners.
• As enacted, section 13 gave the Chief Information Commissioner a term of five years and expressly barred reappointment.
• The Right to Information (Amendment) Act, 2019 replaced the fixed term with a term to be prescribed by the Central Government; the rules made under it prescribe three years.
• The 2019 amendment also removed the statutory parity of salaries and service conditions with the Chief Election Commissioner and Election Commissioners.
• The bar on reappointment of the Chief Information Commissioner survived the amendment, so a Chief Information Commissioner has never been eligible for reappointment.

• Quoting a tenure from a pre-2019 source; the five-year term of the information commissioners no longer appears in the Act.
• Confusing the ceiling of ten Information Commissioners with the strength of some other commission.
• Assuming that because the term was made prescribable, the bar on reappointment was also relaxed. It was not.

Statement items on the Right to Information Act cluster around three details — the ceiling on commissioners, the term of office, and the exemptions in section 8. The term of office is the one that has changed, so it is the one a stem is most likely to get wrong.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Under the Right to Information Act, 2005, the Central Information Commission consists of the Chief Information Commissioner and

  • (a)not more than five Information Commissioners
  • (b)not more than ten Information Commissioners
  • (c)not more than twelve Information Commissioners
  • (d)not more than fifteen Information Commissioners

  Answer(b) not more than ten Information Commissioners — the ceiling set by section 12(2).

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Right to Information (Amendment) Act, 2019 made which of the following changes?

  • (a)It abolished the State Information Commissions
  • (b)It left the term of office and the service conditions of the information commissioners to be prescribed by the Central Government
  • (c)It removed the second appeal
  • (d)It brought political parties within the definition of public authority

  Answer(b) It left the term of office and the service conditions of the information commissioners to be prescribed by the Central Government.