The Right to Information Act Is Twenty Years Old and Quietly Losing Its Force

When Parliament passed the Right to Information Act in 2005, it gave an ordinary citizen something genuinely rare in a large democracy: an enforceable legal right to demand a specific document or explanation from any government office, with a statutory thirty-day deadline and a penalty regime for officials who refused without valid cause. The law grew directly out of grassroots campaigns, most visibly the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan's work in rural Rajasthan through the 1990s, where villagers demanded to see wage records and found that the mere act of demanding transparency exposed large-scale fraud in public works payments. Two decades on, that same law is being administered by information commissions that in several states have gone without a functioning commissioner for months or years at a stretch, applying penalty provisions far less often than the law anticipates, and interpreting exemptions more broadly than the original text supports. The erosion has no single dramatic moment, no repeal, which is part of why it has drawn less sustained public attention than it deserves.

The Vacancy Crisis

Information commissions, the quasi-judicial bodies set up in each state and at the centre to hear appeals when a public authority denies information, have become badly backlogged because states have simply not appointed commissioners in a timely fashion. The Satark Nagrik Sangathan, a transparency advocacy group, has tracked these vacancies systematically and found the Central Information Commission and several state commissions operating for extended periods without a full complement of commissioners, sometimes with no chief commissioner at all, leading to appeal backlogs stretching into years in some states. An appellant whose information request has been wrongly denied and who waits two or three years for a hearing has, in any practical sense, been denied the remedy the law promised, even though the law itself remains formally on the books.

The 2019 Amendment

In 2019, Parliament amended the Act to remove the fixed tenure and status of information commissioners, which had previously been equated with that of an Election Commissioner, and gave the central government the power to determine their tenure and salary through rules. The government argued this was a technical correction to bring the law in line with the status of other statutory bodies, since the original equivalence with the Election Commission had, in its view, been an anomaly. Critics, including several former information commissioners and opposition parties, argued that removing fixed tenure protections made commissioners more susceptible to government pressure, since an appointee whose continuation in office depends on rules the government can change is structurally less independent than one whose tenure is fixed by statute. Both readings can be true at once: the change was a modest one on paper and a meaningful one in its practical effect on institutional independence, which is often how erosion of this kind proceeds.

Exemptions Have Grown, Not Shrunk

The original Act contained exemptions for information affecting national security, ongoing investigations, and personal information involving an unwarranted invasion of privacy, among others, all reasonably standard categories found in transparency laws internationally. Over time, the interpretation of some exemptions, particularly the personal information exemption, has broadened in ways that transparency advocates argue go beyond the law's original intent, with public authorities citing it to withhold information such as educational qualifications of public officials or details of government contracts awarded to specific firms, information that arguably serves a clear public interest that the Act's own proviso says should override a privacy claim in such cases. The 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection Act further amended the RTI Act's personal information exemption in a way that transparency advocates, including several former information commissioners, have warned could be read to exempt a much wider category of information than intended, since it removed the qualifying language that had required authorities to weigh public interest before withholding personal information.

What RTI Actually Uncovered

It is worth recalling, amid this account of erosion, what the law achieved when it functioned as designed. RTI applications have exposed irregularities in the Commonwealth Games organisation, discrepancies in food grain allocation under the public distribution system, questions about educational qualifications of public figures, and details of government expenditure that would otherwise have remained opaque. Journalists, researchers, and ordinary citizens across the country have used it as a routine tool, filing millions of applications each year, a volume that itself testifies to how deeply the law embedded itself in Indian civic life within a remarkably short period after enactment.

The Government's Reasonable Concerns

Officials who defend the amendments point to legitimate operational difficulties: RTI applications are sometimes used for frivolous or vexatious purposes, filed in bulk against individual officers as a form of harassment rather than a genuine information request, and personal information exemptions do need some updating to reflect India's evolving data protection framework rather than remaining frozen in 2005 language. These are fair points, and a transparency regime that ignored genuine privacy interests or tolerated harassment through mass frivolous filing would not itself be well designed. The question is whether the specific remedies chosen, weakening commissioner independence, broadening privacy exemptions without a corresponding public interest override, address these concerns proportionately or use them as cover for a broader narrowing of the law's reach.

Twenty Years On

A law is only as strong as the institutions that enforce it, and the Right to Information Act's institutional infrastructure, the commissions meant to hear appeals and penalise non-compliance, has been allowed to weaken through the quiet mechanisms of vacancy, amendment, and administrative discretion rather than through any single dramatic reversal. That may be the more instructive lesson for anyone concerned with the durability of transparency reforms: laws granting citizens power against the state rarely die by repeal. They are far more likely to be governed into irrelevance, one unfilled vacancy and one broadened exemption at a time, while remaining, on paper, entirely intact.