New Delhi,
The Supreme Court on Friday pulled up 11 states for not appointing Lokayuktas and Uplokayuktas even five years after the enactment of the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013, and asked their chief secretaries to explain in two weeks as to why they dithered.

The states that have not appointed Lokayukta or Uplokayukta are: Jammu and Kashmir, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Tripura, West Bengal and Arunachal Pradesh.

“The chief secretaries of the aforesaid 11 states shall inform the court within two weeks as to whether steps have been taken for appointment of Lokyukta/ Uplokayukta and if so, the stage thereof. The reasons for non-appointment of Lokayukta/ Uplokayukta in the aforesaid states be also laid before the court in the aforesaid affidavit(s) to be filed by the chief secretaries,” the top court said.

The chief secretaries of these states have been asked to specify the deadline by which they would appoint a Lokayukta as required under the Act.

The order came from a Bench headed by Justice Ranjan Gogoi, which also asked the Odisha Chief Secretary to inform it if Lokayuka and Uplokayukta were functional as there was no information available about any such appointment in the state.

Enacted in 2013, the Act received presidential assent on January 1, 2014 and came into force on January 16, 2014. However, the first Lokpal is yet to be appointed and many states were also dithering in appointing Lokayuktas.

The Bench, which is seized of a PIL filed by Delhi BJP leader Ashwini Upadhyay seeking a direction to states to take necessary measures for effective functioning of Lokayuktas, asked his counsel Gopal Shankarnaryanan to name the states that had appointed or not appointed Lokayuktas.

As Shankarnaryanan said many states had appointed Lokayuktas while several others had not, the Bench said: “We want the exact figure. This is not the answer we expect from a counsel in a case of such a magnitude.”

The Bench, which has also been pushing the Centre to appoint a Lokpal, posted the matter further hearing on April 12.