Section 26 — Powers of Chairperson

Every other section in this chapter deals with the Board as an institution — how it's established, who sits on it, how it runs meetings. Section 26 is different: it names three powers that belong specifically to the Chairperson, distinct from the Board's collective decision-making under Section 27 and 28.

The three powers

(a) General superintendence and direction over all administrative matters of the Board — the Chairperson runs the institution's administration, not just its adjudicatory work. (b) Authorising an officer to scrutinise any intimation, complaint, reference or correspondence addressed to the Board — a screening function that lets incoming matters get triaged by an officer the Chairperson designates, rather than requiring the Chairperson or a Member to personally review every single item that arrives. (c) Authorising performance of the Board's functions and the conduct of its proceedings by an individual Member or groups of Members, and allocating proceedings among them — this is the power that lets the Board actually operate through Benches or single-Member panels rather than requiring every Member to sit on every single matter.

Why this matters in practice

Power (c) is the one with the most direct operational consequence: it's what makes it possible for the Board to run multiple matters in parallel, allocated across different Members, rather than functioning as one body that can only handle one proceeding at a time. For an organisation whose case is before the Board, this means the specific Member or group of Members actually deciding a matter is a function of how the Chairperson has allocated proceedings under this power — not something fixed by the Act itself beyond the qualifications standard in Section 19(3) that every Member has to meet regardless of allocation.

Illustration: if the Board faces a high volume of breach intimations and complaints at once, the Chairperson can use power (c) to allocate different proceedings to different individual Members or groups of Members, letting several matters move forward simultaneously instead of queuing behind a single decision-maker.

How Section 26 connects to the rest of the Act

Section 27 sets out the substantive powers and functions the Board exercises once a matter reaches it — inquiring into breaches, imposing penalties, registering Consent Managers. Section 26 is about who within the Board actually exercises those Section 27 functions for any given matter, and how administrative and screening authority is distributed beneath the Chairperson. Section 23(3)'s senior-most-Member rule is the mechanism that keeps this allocation authority functioning even when the Chairperson herself is temporarily unable to act.