New Delhi: Over 40,000 Right to Information (RTI) cases are pending with the Central Information Commission (CIC) even as it functions with the full sanctioned strength of staff, data on the CIC portal shows.The CIC is headed by chief information commissioner Raj Kumar Goyal, who assumed office in December 2025, and staffs 10 information commissioners.According to the CIC portal, 3,733 complaints and 36,350 appeals are pending with the CIC, as of August 12, bringing the total pending cases to 40,083.Of this backlog, Goyal alone has 5,317 pending cases with 522 complaints and 4,795 appeals. Zero progress in AugustAccording to the CIC’s monthly progress report, only two information commissioners have cleared three appeals in August, while the remaining commissioners reported zero movement on RTI appeals.The appeals were cleared by ICs Vinod Kumar Tiwari and Swagat Das, who disposed of one and two cases, respectively.This year, Goyal has disposed of 1,180 of the 2,541 appeals admitted by him between January and July, with an average clearance rate of 46%. In January, he disposed of 164 of 313 appeals; 167 out of 259 in February; 198 out of 358 in March; 154 out of 371 in April; 162 out of 376 in May; 189 out of 400 in June and 146 out of 464 in July. The report records no appeals admitted or disposed of by Goyal in August so far.Eight other ICs – Anandi Ramalingam, Surendra Singh Meena, Ashutosh Chaturvedi, Sudha Rani Relangi, P. R. Ramesh, Khushwant Singh Sethi, Jaya Varma Sinha, Sanjeev Kumar Jindal – too have reported zero cases admitted and disposed of 12 days into August.According to the portal, the CIC has received 20,163 appeals as of August this year, of which only 11,903 have been cleared.The month-wise break down of the cases disposed of by each IC in 2026 is as follows: Transparency activist Commodore Lokesh Batra (retired), while mentioning a 2015 instance on the pendencies in the CIC, asked,”Are the present lot of commissioners are deliberately going slow to frustrate the RTI users and in the process of killing your right to know?” He was referring to a similar backlog of over 40,000 cases in the CIC when it did not have a chief and was short on three ICs in 2015. “With a huge number of pending cases in CIC, the commission requires drastic reforms including its chief to work on Saturdays,” Batra said.