Hurdles in the Implementation of the RTI Act

The composition of the selection committee

Under section 12(3) the committee is the Prime Minister as Chairperson, the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, and a Union Cabinet Minister nominated by the Prime Minister. Two of the three are the Government.

2. Administrative hurdles

Poor compliance with section 4

This is the largest single failure, and it is worth putting first in an answer, because section 4 was designed to make most applications unnecessary.

Section 4(2) states the design in the Act's own words: it shall be a constant endeavour of every public authority to provide as much information suo motu to the public at regular intervals through various means of communication, including the internet, so that the public have minimum resort to the use of this Act to obtain information. Where the seventeen classes in section 4(1)(b) are not published, every citizen who needs any of them must apply individually, and the load falls on the very machinery that is already overburdened.

Record management

Section 4(1)(a) requires records to be duly catalogued and indexed and, where appropriate, computerised and networked. Where that has not been done, an honest officer cannot find the file, and "information not available" becomes the answer to a request which ought to have been answered. Poor record keeping is therefore not a neutral administrative failing; it is a barrier to a statutory right.

Training and capacity

Public Information Officers are ordinarily officers with another full time job, given the additional duty without training in the exemptions or in how to sever a record under section 10. The result is over-refusal: an officer who does not understand section 8 refuses the whole file to be safe.

The habit of secrecy

The administrative reflex is the one visible in Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, AIR 1978 SC 597.

Facts. A passport issued in June 1976 was impounded in July 1977 by an order under section 10(3)(c) of the Passports Act 1967 which recited only that it was "in public interest". The petitioner was given no hearing, and when she asked for the reasons the Government declined to furnish them, saying that it was not in the interest of the general public to do so.

Held. Article 14 strikes at arbitrariness in State action and ensures fairness and equality of treatment: equality and arbitrariness are sworn enemies, one belonging to the rule of law in a republic and the other to the whim and caprice of an absolute monarch. The procedure contemplated by Article 21 must answer the test of reasonableness in order to conform to Article 14, being right and just and fair and not arbitrary, fanciful or oppressive, and natural justice may be implied even where the statute is silent.

Why it matters here. The refusal to explain, on the ground that explanation was not in the public interest, is the culture the Act was passed to change, and the persistence of that culture is why implementation lags behind the statute.

3. Legal hurdles

Expansive use of the exemptions

Section 8(1) is a list of ten defined heads, and an authority must identify which it relies on. In practice clauses are invoked broadly: fiduciary relationship under clause (e) and personal information under clause (j) are the two most commonly stretched. Section 8(2)'s public interest override is permissive in form, "may allow access", and is often not considered at all, which is a failure to exercise a discretion the authority possesses: [Grounds of Judicial Review: Failure to Exercise Discretion].

The narrowing of section 8(1)(j) on 13 November 2025

Section 8(1)(j) was substituted by section 44 of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, being Act 22 of 2023, with effect from 13 November 2025, and now reads simply "information which relates to personal information".

The clause it replaced exempted personal information only where the disclosure had no relationship to any public activity or interest, or would cause an unwarranted invasion of privacy, and then only unless the officer or the appellate authority was satisfied that the larger public interest justified disclosure, with a proviso that information which cannot be denied to Parliament or a State Legislature shall not be denied to any person.

Section 8(2) is untouched, so a general public interest override survives, and it is wrong to say the Act now has no such test. But the clause specific balance has gone, and so has the Parliament proviso. Since a very large proportion of requests concern the acts of named officials, which are personal information in a literal sense, the practical reach of the change is wide, and it is the most significant legal hurdle now facing the Act.

The counter-argument must be given for balance: privacy is itself a fundamental right, held to be protected under Article 21 and as part of Part III in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd) v. Union of India, AIR 2017 SC 4161, and a legislature is entitled to decide where the line between two constitutional values falls. The question is one of degree, and the criticism is that the new clause draws no line at all and leaves everything to the discretion under section 8(2).

Section 24 exclusions

Section 24 removes the intelligence and security organisations in the Second Schedule from the Act altogether, and the Central Government may add to the Schedule by notification under section 24(2). Additions have been made over the years. The safeguard is that information on allegations of corruption and human rights violations is not excluded.

Delay in the appeal machinery

A right whose enforcement takes years is weakened at the point where it matters. The thirty and forty-five day limits in section 19 apply to the first appeal; there is no corresponding statutory deadline binding the Commission on a second appeal.

4. Social hurdles

Harassment and violence against applicants. Applicants who have sought information about land, contracts and public works have been threatened, assaulted and in a number of documented cases killed. That is the most serious failure of implementation, and it is not a failure of the Act's text.

And the statute meant to protect them is not in force. The Whistle Blowers Protection Act, being Act 17 of 2014, has never been brought into force because no notification under its section 1(3) has ever been issued, as the Government stated in Parliament on 12 December 2024 and again on 11 December 2025: [Whistleblowers' Protection: the Act of 2014 and the PIDPI Resolution]. The protection that exists is the PIDPI Resolution 2004 administered by the Central Vigilance Commission, which is an executive resolution conferring no enforceable right.

That pairing is the sharpest thing that can be said in this chapter: the Act gives a citizen the right to expose wrongdoing, and the Act meant to protect him for doing so has never commenced.

Awareness and literacy. A right that must be exercised in writing, with a fee, is harder to use for those who most need it, though section 6(1)'s requirement that an officer reduce an oral request to writing and section 7's provision for assistance to a sensorily disabled person are designed to meet this.

The residual sections, 26 to 31

No syllabus topic names these, and they are covered here so that nothing in the Act is untaught.

• Section 26, appropriate Government to prepare programmes. The appropriate Government shall, to the extent of availability of financial and other resources, develop and organise educational programmes to advance the understanding of the public, especially of disadvantaged communities, as to how to exercise the rights contemplated under the Act; encourage public authorities to participate in such programmes and to undertake them themselves; promote timely and effective dissemination of accurate information about their activities; and train Public Information Officers and produce relevant training materials. It shall within eighteen months compile a guide in an easily comprehensible form containing information about the Act, and update it. This section is the answer to the awareness hurdle, and its poor implementation is itself a hurdle.
• Section 27, power to make rules by the appropriate Government, on the cost of the medium in which information is supplied, the fee payable, the salaries and allowances and conditions of service under sections 13(5) and 16(5), the procedure to be adopted by the Commission in deciding appeals, and any other prescribed matter.
• Section 28, power to make rules by the competent authority, that is, by the Speaker, the Chairman, the Chief Justice of India, the Chief Justice of a High Court, the President, the Governor or the administrator for their own institutions.
• Section 29, laying of rules, before Parliament or the State legislature, which is the laying procedure treated in [Legislative Control over Delegated Legislation].
• Section 30, power to remove difficulties, exercisable by the Central Government by order published in the Official Gazette, not inconsistent with the Act, and not after the expiry of two years from the date of commencement, every such order to be laid before each House. This is the confined Henry VIII clause discussed in [Forms and Types of Delegated Legislation].
• Section 31, repeal, of the Freedom of Information Act 2002, which the present Act replaced.

The reforms most often proposed

1. Fill the vacancies, and provide a statutory deadline for appointment.
2. Restore a fixed statutory tenure and salary for the Commissioners, so that independence does not depend on rules made by the Government.
3. Enforce section 4 by audit of proactive disclosure and by treating non-compliance as a default attracting consequences.
4. Invest in record management, since the Act cannot work without it.
5. Train Public Information Officers, particularly on the exemptions and on severance under section 10.
6. Bring the Whistle Blowers Protection Act into force, with whatever amendments are thought necessary, so that the person who uses the Act is protected.
7. Reconsider section 8(1)(j) so that the balance between transparency and privacy is drawn in the clause rather than left entirely to discretion.

A worked example

A citizen asks a municipal corporation for the muster rolls and payment records of a road project.

Where it should end. Under section 4(1)(b) the corporation should already have published the budget allocated, the plans and reports on disbursements, and the manner of execution of the works, so that no application was needed.

Where it actually goes. The application is filed; the officer replies after fifty days that the records are with the contractor; the citizen appeals under section 19(1); the first appellate authority does not decide; a second appeal is filed and is listed eighteen months later; the Commission directs disclosure; part of the record has by then been destroyed.

Which hurdles operated. Non-compliance with section 4; poor record management under section 4(1)(a); delay beyond section 7's thirty days; failure of the first appellate authority to decide within thirty or forty-five days; the backlog in the Commission; and destruction of records, which is itself a ground for penalty under section 20(1).

What would have changed the outcome. Proactive publication, a functioning first appellate authority, a Commission without a backlog, and a penalty imposed early enough to matter.

What it does NOT mean

It does not mean the Act is badly drafted. Most of the hurdles are failures of implementation, not of text. The exceptions are the two amendments, in 2019 and 2025.

It does not mean the Act has failed. It has changed the relationship between the citizen and the file more than any other Indian statute of its generation, which is why it is cited throughout this book.

It does not mean privacy concerns are illegitimate. Privacy is a fundamental right, and the argument is about where the line falls.

It does not mean nothing can be done. Every hurdle above has a stated remedy, and most require administration rather than legislation.

Quick revision

1. Institutional: vacancies and backlogs in the Commissions; no deadline for appointment; independence reduced by the Right to Information (Amendment) Act 2019, Act 24 of 2019, which with effect from 24 October 2019 replaced the five year statutory term in sections 13 and 16 with such term as the Central Government prescribes, and made salaries a matter of prescription; a selection committee of which two of three members are the Government.
2. Administrative: poor compliance with section 4, though section 4(2) states the object as minimum resort to the use of the Act; weak record management under section 4(1)(a); untrained Public Information Officers leading to over-refusal; and the inherited habit of secrecy.
3. Legal: expansive use of the exemptions, especially clauses (e) and (j); the section 8(2) override being permissive and often not considered; the substitution of section 8(1)(j) by section 44 of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, Act 22 of 2023, with effect from 13 November 2025, which removed the no relationship to public activity test, the unwarranted invasion of privacy test, the internal public interest override and the Parliament proviso; additions to the Second Schedule under section 24(2); and delay in the appeal machinery.
4. Social: harassment of and violence against applicants, and the fact that the Whistle Blowers Protection Act 2014 has never been brought into force, leaving only the PIDPI Resolution 2004.
5. Residual sections: section 26, educational programmes and a guide within eighteen months; section 27, rules by the appropriate Government; section 28, rules by the competent authority; section 29, laying; section 30, removal of difficulties within two years; section 31, repeal of the Freedom of Information Act 2002.
6. Reforms: fill vacancies with a statutory deadline; restore statutory tenure and salary; enforce and audit section 4; invest in record management; train officers; commence the whistleblower statute; and reconsider section 8(1)(j).

Test yourself

1. What are the principal hurdles in the implementation of the Right to Information Act 2005? They are institutional, administrative, legal and social. Institutionally, the Information Commissions function with vacancies and long backlogs, there is no statutory deadline for filling posts, and the Right to Information (Amendment) Act 2019 reduced their independence by replacing the fixed five year term in sections 13 and 16 with such term as the Central Government prescribes and by making salaries and conditions of service a matter of prescription. Administratively, compliance with the proactive disclosure duty in section 4 is poor, record management under section 4(1)(a) is weak so that information cannot be found, and Public Information Officers are untrained and refuse expansively to be safe. Legally, the exemptions in section 8(1) are invoked broadly, the section 8(2) public interest override is permissive and often not considered at all, and clause (j) was substituted with effect from 13 November 2025 to exempt personal information without any balancing test in the clause. Socially, applicants have been harassed, assaulted and in some cases killed, and the Whistle Blowers Protection Act meant to protect them has never been brought into force.

2. How did the amendment of 2019 affect the Information Commissions? Sections 2 and 3 of the Right to Information (Amendment) Act 2019, Act 24 of 2019, with effect from 24 October 2019, substituted the tenure provisions in sections 13 and 16 of the principal Act. Where the Chief Information Commissioner and the Information Commissioners, and their State counterparts, formerly held office for a term of five years fixed by the statute, they now hold office for such term as may be prescribed by the Central Government; and their salaries, allowances and other conditions of service are likewise such as that Government prescribes, subject only to a proviso that they shall not be varied to their disadvantage after appointment. Those appointed before the amendment continue to be governed as if it had not come into force. The criticism is that the independence of an appellate body rests on a tenure and a salary that the party appearing before it cannot alter, and that the amendment gives the Government control over both. The repeal of the amending Act by the Repealing and Amending Act 2023 is housekeeping and does not restore the earlier wording.

3. Why is non-compliance with section 4 the largest administrative hurdle? Because section 4 was designed to make most applications unnecessary. It requires records to be catalogued, indexed and where appropriate computerised; it requires seventeen classes of information to be published, including the norms set for the discharge of functions, the rules and manuals used, budgets and disbursements, subsidy programmes and beneficiaries, and the particulars of officers; it requires reasons for administrative and quasi-judicial decisions to be given to affected persons; and section 4(2) states that it shall be a constant endeavour to provide information suo motu so that the public have minimum resort to the use of the Act. Where that is not done, every citizen who needs any of that information must apply individually, the burden falls on an already overloaded machinery, and the appeal backlog grows. Non-compliance with section 4 therefore causes much of the strain elsewhere in the system.

4. What is the effect of the change to section 8(1)(j), and what is the argument on the other side? Section 8(1)(j) was substituted by section 44 of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, Act 22 of 2023, with effect from 13 November 2025, and now exempts simply information which relates to personal information. The clause it replaced exempted personal information only where the disclosure had no relationship to any public activity or interest or would cause an unwarranted invasion of privacy, and then only unless the officer or appellate authority was satisfied that a larger public interest justified disclosure, with a proviso that what cannot be denied to a legislature cannot be denied to a citizen. The internal balancing test and the proviso are gone, and since a very large proportion of requests concern the acts of named officials the practical reach is wide; the only remaining route is the general override in section 8(2), which is permissive. The argument on the other side is that privacy is itself a fundamental right, protected under Article 21 and Part III as held in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd) v. Union of India, AIR 2017 SC 4161, and that a legislature may decide where the line between two constitutional values falls. The criticism is not that privacy is unimportant but that the new clause draws no line at all.

5. What reforms would address the hurdles? Filling the vacancies in the Commissions and providing a statutory deadline for appointment, so that the enforcement machinery exists. Restoring a fixed statutory tenure and salary for the Commissioners, so that their independence does not rest on rules made by the Government whose refusals they review. Enforcing section 4 by auditing proactive disclosure and attaching consequences to default. Investing in record management, without which the Act cannot operate. Training Public Information Officers, especially on the exemptions and on severance under section 10, since over-refusal is largely a product of ignorance. Bringing the Whistle Blowers Protection Act into force, with whatever amendments are considered necessary, so that the citizen who uses the Act is protected. And reconsidering section 8(1)(j) so that the balance between transparency and privacy is drawn in the clause itself rather than left wholly to a discretion. Section 26 of the Act, requiring educational programmes and a guide in easily comprehensible form, already provides for public awareness, and implementing it would address the social hurdle.