The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in the 2014 general elections on the back of a popular anti-corruption movement with the promise of a Bhrashtachar mukt Bharat (Corruption-free India). In a democracy as vast as India, the most effective way to fight corruption is to empower citizens with relevant information to hold the government and its functionaries accountable. Unfortunately, the last 11 years of BJP rule have seen a systematic undermining of the transparency regime in the country.
The Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005 has been one of the most empowering legislations for the citizens of India and has enabled people to meaningfully participate in democracy. Estimates suggest that every year four to six million RTI applications are filed in the country. The law has been used extensively in the last two decades to hold governments and public functionaries accountable for corruption and lapses in the delivery of essential services and secure access to basic rights. Twenty years after the implementation of the RTI law in the country, it is abundantly evident that if people, especially the poor and marginalised, are to have any hope of accessing their rights and entitlements, they need to have access to relevant and timely information. This was further highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic, when access to accurate and real time information on availability of hospital beds and oxygen became absolutely critical for survival of lakhs of patients.
It is behind the cloak of secrecy that the rights of individuals are abrogated and corruption thrives. The RTI Act has been used to question the highest authorities of the country on their performance, their decisions and their conduct. The legislation has played a pivotal role in exposing major scams — the electoral bonds scam, Vyapam scam and the Adarsh housing society scam. The RTI law has also been used to seek details of oversight by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in light of several banking scams, finally resulting in an important judgment of the Supreme Court, wherein it held that the RBI must disclose information like inspection reports, risk assessment report of banks, names of willful loan defaulters and details of Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) of public sector banks.
The law has initiated the vital task of redistributing power in a democratic framework. It is perhaps for this reason, that there is a severe backlash against the legislation, and those who use it.
Under the RTI law, Information Commissions (ICs) play a critical role — they are the final appellate authority and have wide-ranging powers, including the power to require public authorities to provide access to information and penalise errant officials for violations of the transparency law.
Governments are scuttling the RTI Act by not appointing information commissioners and allowing the commissions to crumble under the weight of mounting backlogs. The Report Card on the functioning of ICs in India by the Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS) shows that seven out of 29 ICs were defunct for varying periods of time in 2023-24. The report shows that the central government has not appointed a single commissioner in the Central Information Commission since May 2014 till people have approached the courts! The commission of Jharkhand has not been functional for over five years now! In October 2023, the Supreme Court noted that the RTI Act will become a ‘dead letter’ if vacancies in ICs are not filled.
Vacancies lead to a large backlog of appeals and complaints in the commissions — currently there are over 400,000 cases pending in information commissions across the country. People have to wait for inordinately long periods of time to have their cases heard — research shows that in 14 commissions it would take more than one year for an appeal or complaint to be disposed. This renders the information meaningless for them — information delayed is information denied.
Another setback for the transparency watchdogs came in 2019 in the form of an amendment to the RTI Act which weakened the autonomy of commissions. Security of tenure and high status had been provided for commissioners under the RTI Act of 2005 to enable them to function independently and direct even the highest offices to comply with the provisions of the law. The RTI Amendment Act passed by Parliament in July 2019, empowers the central government to make rules to decide the tenure, salaries and post-retirement benefits of all commissioners in the country. These amendments could potentially make commissioners wary of giving directions to disclose information that the central government does not wish to provide, for the fear that their pensions and other post-retirement benefits could be adversely impacted.
In August 2023, another blow was dealt to peoples’ right to information. The government pushed through Parliament, the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, which includes a provision to amend the right to information law. In January 2025, the government published draft rules of the DPDP Act for public comments, and as per news reports, the law is going to be operationalised soon.
Section 44(3) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP Act) has amended the RTI Act, adversely impacting the ability of people to access information. The amendment made to section 8(1)(j) of RTI Act seeks to exempt all personal information from disclosure. It does away with the exceptions carved out within the RTI Act wherein personal information could be denied only if it had no relationship to any public activity or public interest; or would cause unwarranted invasion of privacy. Further, the amendment has also done away with an important proviso to section 8(1) of the RTI Act which stated that “information which cannot be denied to the Parliament or a State Legislature shall not be denied to any person”.
To seek accountability from the government, people need access to information, including various categories of personal data. For example, the Supreme Court has held that citizens have a right to know the names of wilful defaulters and details of Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) of public sector banks. Democracies routinely ensure public disclosure of voters’ lists with names, addresses and other personal data to enable public scrutiny and prevent electoral fraud. Experience of the use of the RTI Act in India has shown that if people, especially the poor and marginalised, are to have any hope of obtaining the benefits of government schemes and welfare programs, they must have access to relevant, granular information. For instance, the Public Distribution System (PDS) Control Order recognises the need for putting the details of ration card holders and records of ration shops in the public domain to enable public scrutiny and social audits of the PDS. The RTI Act has also been used extensively by investigative journalists to expose scams and corruption which often involves accessing personal information, including names of government functionaries involved in corruption or wrongdoing. By making regressive amendments to section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act, the DPDP law has severely restricted peoples’ ability to access crucial information.
The amendments will potentially block disclosure of information, including: names of loan defaulters; electoral bond purchasers; voter lists; asset declarations of public servants; names of officials involved in decision-making; names of contractors – on the grounds that it is personal information.
In any democracy, it is critical for the government to collect data in a timely and accurate manner. This is also a fundamental prerequisite for effective functioning of the RTI Act. However, in recent years, on several key issues, the government has dodged public scrutiny by claiming that it does not have data.
In response to RTI applications and even questions raised by MPs in Parliament, the government has claimed that it does not have data on the number of deaths due to lack of oxygen during COVID-19, paper leaks in competitive examinations like NEET, data on the losses caused due to natural calamities and the reasons for farmer suicides, details of electronic surveillance authorised by the government, etc. More recently, the Election Commission of India (ECOI) in response to RTI applications stated that no information was available on any appraisal undertaken based on which ECI decided to initiate a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls across the country in 2025 and nor did it have any files related to the decision.
Nearly a hundred whistleblowers have been killed across the country for seeking information under the RTI Act and exposing corruption and wrongdoing in the government. Showing complete lack of political will to provide a robust whistleblower protection framework in the country, the government has taken no steps for over nine years to implement the Whistle Blowers Protection (WBP) Act passed in 2014, which provides for the protection of identity of whistleblowers and safeguards against their victimisation. As a result, whistleblowers who show truth to power, often at great risk, have no statutory mechanism for seeking protection.
The government’s attempts to undermine the transparency regime are a testament to the power of the RTI Act. It is critical for people to continue to extensively use the RTI Act and struggle to protect it from further erosion. After all, eternal vigilance is the price of democracy!
The authors work on issues of transparency and accountability and are associated with the National Campaign for Peoples’ Right to Information and Satark Nagrik Sangathan
Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth