The Central Information Commission — the one place where they have to prove it, not you

What to do this week

The RTI Act is the most powerful thing an ordinary person in this country has been handed, and it is also the most wasted. Not because offices are clever about refusing — most refusals are lazy and would not survive five minutes of scrutiny — but because the request that arrived was impossible to answer usefully, and because the person who sent it then waited three months for a reply that was never going to come and missed the appeal.

This is not a case, and you are not a plaintiff

Everything else on this website is adversarial. A tenant and a landlord. An accused and the State. A consumer and a company. Somebody is claiming, somebody is defending, and the person who asserts has to prove. That shape is so familiar that people carry it into the RTI process without noticing, and it does them real harm.

An RTI application is not a claim. You are not saying that anybody wronged you. You are not asking for a finding, a direction against a person, damages, or an apology. You are asking a public office for a copy of a paper that it holds on behalf of the public, and the Act begins from the position that you are entitled to it unless a specific exemption applies. You do not have to be affected by the matter. You do not have to be a resident of that state, or of that city, or even connected with the subject in any way. Any citizen may ask.

Two practical consequences follow, and both of them save people money. The first is that the application does not need a narrative. Pages explaining how badly you have been treated do not help; they make the request harder to process and give the office something to respond to instead of the document. The second is that you do not need to be right about anything. You may be entirely mistaken about what the file contains. That is allowed. You are asking to see it.

Section 19(5) — the sentence that changes the whole process

If you read nothing else about the RTI Act, read this. Section 19(5) provides:

Sit with what that means. The officer refused. The officer now has to come to the appeal and establish that the refusal was justified — which clause of Section 8 or Section 9 he used, why the record falls inside it, and why nothing could be severed and released under Section 10. You do not have to prove that it does not fall inside. You do not have to prove that you deserve it. You do not have to prove anything at all.

This is why a refusal that simply says “denied under Section 8” is so weak. It names no clause. It gives no reasoning. It is not a justification, it is a gesture in the direction of one. At the appeal, the person who has to fill that gap is the officer, and very often he cannot, because the clause was never really considered — the refusal was a reflex.

The practical use of this section is in how you write the appeal. You do not have to build a case. You have to point at the hole. The reply does not state which sub-clause of Section 8 is relied upon. It gives no reasons. Section 19(5) places the onus of justifying the denial on the respondent. The appellant is not required to anticipate a ground that has not been stated. Three sentences, and the burden is where the Act put it.

Records, not answers — the mistake that costs most people their RTI

Now the other half, and this is the one that does the real damage, because it defeats the application before any exemption is even reached.

People write questions. “Why has my application not been processed?” “Who is responsible for this delay?” “What action has been taken against the officer?” “Is it correct that…?” These feel like the most natural things in the world to ask, and they are all, legally, the wrong shape.

So the Act is a machine for releasing things that already exist. It is not a machine for producing explanations. An office that receives “why has my file not moved” can truthfully say that it holds no document called an explanation, and it will.

The same curiosity, asked correctly, is unanswerable:

Notice what the right-hand column has in common. Every entry names a thing that either sits in a file or does not. There is no judgement for the officer to make, nothing to infer, nothing to compose. If the document exists, he has to release it or find an exemption — and then Section 19(5) applies to him.

Writing the request so that it cannot be brushed off

There is no prescribed form for an RTI application in the Act, and anybody who tells you there is a mandatory format is selling something. Plain paper works. What matters is the content, and six habits carry almost all of the weight.

If you want somebody to do this for you, that is exactly what our RTI application service is — drafting it so that it asks for records, identifying the right public authority and officer, and filing it online or by post. But read the honest paragraph at the end of this page before you order, because for a simple request you do not need us.

The three steps and the three clocks

The structure is simple and the deadlines are the whole game. There is no relief anywhere in this Act for a person who was slow.

Two things about this table are worth saying out loud. The first appeal does not go to the Commission — it goes to somebody inside the same office, senior to the officer who refused. People skip it and write straight to the Commission, and the appeal comes back. The second appeal is where the Commission enters, and it will normally want to see that the first appeal was made.

And the ninety days for the second appeal run from the date on which the first appeal decision should have been made or was actually received — so if your first appellate authority also stays silent, the clock still starts. It does not wait for him.

Silence is a refusal — and it is where most good cases die

This is the single most common way a strong RTI is lost, and it is heartbreaking because the person did nothing wrong except be patient.

You file. Thirty days pass. Nothing comes. It feels premature to appeal against nothing, so you wait another month, then telephone, then send a polite reminder, then wait again. By the time you accept that no reply is coming, four months have gone and the thirty days for your first appeal expired long ago.

Under the Act, a failure to reply within the period is a deemed refusal. The thirty days for the first appeal run from the expiry of the officer’s period, not from any reply. So the day after the deadline passes is the day to appeal — and a reminder is not an appeal, a telephone call is not an appeal, and an e-mail to a general grievance address is not an appeal.

Section 7(6) — if they miss the deadline, it is free

A small provision that almost nobody uses, and it is useful out of all proportion to its size. Where the Public Information Officer fails to comply with the time limit, the information has to be provided free of charge. No copying charges, nothing.

So the sequence that happens constantly — no reply for two months, then a letter asking you to deposit copying charges for four hundred pages — is one you can answer in a single line: the reply being beyond the period prescribed by Section 7(1), the information is to be furnished free of charge under Section 7(6). It works surprisingly often, and where it does not, it becomes a clean ground of appeal.

You never have to say why you want it

Section 6(2) provides that an applicant shall not be required to give any reason for requesting the information, or any personal details except those necessary for contacting him. This is one of the quiet strengths of the Indian Act and it is worth knowing because it is regularly ignored.

Replies arrive asking what the purpose is, how the applicant is concerned with the matter, whether he is a resident of the area, or requesting an affidavit or an identity document not required by the Rules. None of that has a basis in the Act. The correct response is not to argue and not to comply, but to write one polite sentence — that Section 6(2) does not require an applicant to state reasons, and that the request stands — and to treat the demand as part of the appeal if the information is still not given.

There is a related trap on the other side. Because you need not give reasons, do not give them. Applicants who explain that they want the file for a court case sometimes find the reply addressed to that instead of to the documents.

The first appeal — the stage people treat as a formality

Most applicants regard the first appeal as a box to tick on the way to the Commission. That is a mistake in time terms alone: a first appeal decided properly gets you the document in weeks, while a second appeal is a longer road.

It goes to an officer senior in rank to the PIO within the same public authority. There is no fee for it in the central Rules and no prescribed form in the Act. What makes one work is structure rather than length.

Where drafting it is useful to have done for you, that is an appeal drafting job and it is a small one. But the structure above is the whole trick, and it is printed here so that you can do it yourself if you would rather.

The second appeal — what actually has to be in the file

The second appeal goes to the Commission within ninety days. This is the stage where paperwork discipline starts to matter, because appeals are returned for incompleteness far more often than they are rejected on merits.

What the Commission needs to see is the whole history, in order: the original application with proof of despatch, the reply if any, the first appeal with proof of despatch, the first appellate authority’s order if any, and a short statement of what is still not given. Index it. Number the pages. Serve advance copies on the PIO and the first appellate authority and keep the proof — that last step is the one most often missed.

Keep the grounds short and factual. The Commission is deciding one narrow thing: whether you are entitled to the record and whether the refusal was justified. It is not deciding your underlying grievance, and pages about the grievance make the appeal harder to read, not more sympathetic.

Complaint or appeal? — the fork where people take the wrong road

The Act has two separate routes to the Commission and they are not alternatives dressed in different clothes. Section 18 is a complaint. Section 19 is an appeal. In Chief Information Commissioner v. State of Manipur (Supreme Court, 12 December 2011) the Court held that the two proceed from different premises and that the complaint procedure is not a substitute for the appeal procedure.

The practical warning is this. People discover that a complaint has no ninety-day limit, realise they are out of time for the appeal, and file a complaint instead in the hope that it amounts to the same thing. It does not, and choosing that road because the deadline for the other one has passed is a decision to discuss with somebody who knows the area before you make it.

The clean answer when you are late is usually different and duller: file a fresh application. It costs a small fee, it takes ten minutes, and it gives you a brand new set of dates with nothing to explain.

What the Commission can order — and what it cannot

Section 19(8) gives the Commission real powers, and they are wider than most applicants expect. It can require the public authority to take steps to comply with the Act — providing the information in a particular form, appointing a Public Information Officer, publishing information or categories of information, making changes to its record management, or training its officers. It can require the authority to compensate the complainant for any loss or other detriment suffered. It can impose the penalty in Section 20. And it can reject the appeal. Under Section 19(7) its decisions are binding.

What it cannot do is decide your underlying grievance. It cannot release your pension, set aside your transfer, cancel the contract you suspect, punish the officer you are angry with, or declare that you were treated unfairly. It decides one question: are you entitled to this record. People arrive expecting a judgment about their life and receive a direction about a photocopy, and feel let down — when in fact the photocopy is the thing that lets the real fight be won somewhere else.

The penalty in Section 20 — and who actually gets the money

Section 20(1) is the provision everybody has heard of and almost nobody has read properly. Where the Commission is of the opinion that the officer without reasonable cause refused to receive an application, or did not furnish information within the time specified, or malafidely denied the request, or knowingly gave incorrect, incomplete or misleading information, or destroyed information, or obstructed the furnishing of it, it may impose a penalty of two hundred and fifty rupees each day until the application is received or the information furnished, subject to the total not exceeding twenty-five thousand rupees. Section 20(2) allows it to recommend disciplinary action where the breaches were persistent and without reasonable cause.

None of this makes the penalty pointless. Asking for it, with dates and with the specific default identified, changes how seriously a file is treated inside the office — frequently the information appears between the notice and the hearing. Just do not confuse a deterrent with a remedy.

Section 8 — the refusals, and what a real one looks like

Section 8(1) lists the grounds on which information may be withheld. In outline they cover sovereignty and integrity of India, security, strategic, scientific or economic interests, relations with a foreign state and incitement of an offence; information forbidden to be published by a court or which would be contempt; information whose disclosure would cause a breach of privilege of Parliament or a State legislature; commercial confidence, trade secrets and intellectual property where disclosure would harm the competitive position of a third party; information available to a person in his fiduciary relationship; information received in confidence from a foreign government; information that would endanger the life or physical safety of any person or identify a confidential source; information that would impede investigation, apprehension or prosecution; cabinet papers including records of deliberations of the Council of Ministers; and personal information. Section 9 allows refusal where disclosure would involve an infringement of copyright subsisting in a person other than the State.

Three things about this list matter far more in practice than the list itself.

Section 8(1)(j) — what changed in November 2025

This is the most important development in the RTI Act in twenty years, and a great deal of what is written about RTI online was written before it and is now wrong.

Section 8(1)(j) used to exempt personal information whose disclosure had no relationship to any public activity or interest, or which would cause an unwarranted invasion of privacy — unless the officer or the appellate authority was satisfied that the larger public interest justified disclosure. It also carried a proviso that information which cannot be denied to Parliament or a State legislature shall not be denied to any person. Those two safeguards were the whole reason the clause worked: a public servant’s conduct in his public role could be reached where the public interest justified it.

That is the entire clause now. Four words, no balancing test, no proviso.

It is being challenged. On 16 February 2026 the Supreme Court — the Chief Justice of India Surya Kant sitting with Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice Vipul M. Pancholi — issued notice on petitions filed by Venkatesh Nayak, by The Reporters Collective with the journalist Nitin Sethi, and by the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information. The Court declined to stay the amendment, observing that it would not introduce through an interim order a regime that Parliament had legislated, and referred the matter to a larger Bench. As this page is written the challenge is pending and the amendment is in force.

Section 8(2) — a door that is still open, but it is their door

There is an argument worth knowing, and it turns on a provision the amendment did not touch.

Read it carefully, because the argument and its weakness are both in the text. It sits above all the exemptions in sub-section (1), including the amended clause about personal information. It keeps a public-interest test alive somewhere in the Act. And it says may.

That word does the damage. Section 8(2) is a discretion that belongs to the public authority. It is not a right you can assert the way the old proviso to Section 8(1)(j) could be asserted. An officer who declines to exercise it is not obviously breaking the law, and you are not obviously entitled to anything. So it is a weaker instrument than what was taken away — but it is not nothing, and it costs you a paragraph.

The practical advice is therefore: where personal information is involved and there is a genuine public interest, put the public interest on the record anyway, expressly invoking Section 8(2), with specifics rather than slogans — what public function this person was performing, what public money is involved, what the disclosure would let the public verify. Whether it succeeds is out of your hands. Whether it was asked for is not, and if the matter ever reaches a High Court it will matter that it was.

When the record is about somebody else — Section 11

Where the information relates to or was supplied by a third party and has been treated as confidential by that party, Section 11 requires the officer to give that party written notice and to consider its submission before deciding. The third party gets an opportunity to be heard, and it can appeal an order of disclosure.

Two things follow. Your application will take longer, and that is lawful rather than obstruction. And the third party’s objection is not a veto: the section requires the officer to take the submission into account, not to obey it, and disclosure may be allowed where the public interest outweighs any harm to the third party’s protected interests. Where a reply says only that the third party objected, that is not by itself a justified denial under Section 19(5).

Section 24 — exempt organisations, and the proviso that matters

Section 24 puts the intelligence and security organisations listed in the Second Schedule, and their state counterparts notified by state governments, outside the Act. This is a real exclusion, and being told that an organisation is listed is usually accurate.

But read the proviso, because it is the part that is left out when this section is quoted at you: information pertaining to allegations of corruption and human rights violations is not excluded. There is an additional procedure for human rights information involving the Commission’s approval and a different time limit. So “we are an exempt organisation” is not a complete answer where what you asked about is an allegation of corruption — and if that is your subject, say so in the application itself, in those words, rather than leaving it to be inferred.

“No such information is available”

This reply is sometimes true and sometimes a way of ending a conversation, and telling the two apart is a skill worth having.

It is genuinely true more often than applicants believe. Offices do not hold a document for every fact. There may be no written explanation, no consolidated statement, no register of the kind imagined. Aditya Bandopadhyay is clear that nothing has to be collected or collated into existence for you.

It is not true when the document plainly must exist because the transaction happened — a sanction was issued, a payment was made, a file moved from one desk to another. Government runs on paper and the paper exists somewhere.

Inspection — the most underused right in the Act

Section 2(j) defines the right to information as including the right to inspect work, documents and records, to take notes, extracts and certified copies, and to take certified samples of material. Inspection is a right, not a favour, and almost nobody asks for it.

It is the right answer in three situations. When you do not know what the file contains and cannot name the document. When the file is large and copying charges would make the request expensive — you inspect, identify twelve pages and pay for twelve. And when a refusal is based on volume or on the file containing mixed material, because inspection meets both objections at once.

Ask for it in the application in the alternative, in one line, so that the officer has it in front of him before he reaches for a refusal. When you go, take a list of what you are looking for, note the page numbers, and identify in writing the pages you want copies of.

Section 4 — what should already be published

Section 4 requires every public authority to maintain its records properly and to publish, on its own initiative, a long list of categories — its functions and duties, the powers and duties of its officers, the procedure followed in decision-making, norms it sets for discharging its functions, the rules and manuals it uses, a directory of officers, the budget allocated to each agency, the manner of execution of subsidy programmes, particulars of recipients of concessions and permits, and much else. The section says that the more proactively information is published, the less people should need to use the Act at all.

The practical use is simple: look before you file. A fair number of applications ask for something already on a website, and a reply pointing at the website is a lawful reply. And where the category is one that Section 4 requires to be published but has not been, that is itself worth raising — the Commission can direct publication under Section 19(8).

Central Commission or State Commission?

This page is about the Central Information Commission, and the first thing to settle is whether your matter belongs to it at all. The dividing line is the public authority, not where you live.

The structure, the deadlines and the sections are the same either way — the difference is the address. Sending a second appeal to the wrong Commission does not usually destroy your rights but it costs weeks, so settle the question before you file the original application rather than after.

RTI is a key, not a remedy

This section costs us work to write and it is the most useful thing on the page.

People come to the RTI Act with a problem — a pension not released, a plot encroached upon, a complaint never acted on, a licence refused, a child denied admission — and treat the RTI as the solution. It is not. It produces documents. What makes it valuable is that the documents are what the real remedy needs, and without them the real remedy is usually guesswork.

So the honest sequence is: work out where your remedy actually lies, then use the RTI to get the paper that remedy will need, and do both clocks at once. An RTI filed while the real limitation period quietly expires is a very expensive piece of paper.

Do you need an advocate for this? — the honest answer

Of every forum described on this website, this is the one where the honest answer is most often no, and saying otherwise would be taking money for nothing.

The mistakes that cost people their information

If paying for help is the problem

Of everything on this site, this is the forum where cost should stop you least. There is no court fee here, no stamp paper, no affidavit and no requirement that anybody appear for you. The application fee is small and is fixed by the Rules that apply to the authority you are writing to, and applicants below the poverty line are exempt from it on producing the proof those Rules require. Where the office misses its deadline, Section 7(6) makes the information free.

If the matter does reach a High Court and that is beyond your means, free legal services are provided under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 through the legal services authorities attached to the courts — for people in the categories the statute lists and for those below an income limit that the authority fixes and revises, which is why no figure for it is printed here. Ask at the legal services desk in the court complex itself; it costs nothing to ask and the answer comes the same day.

The papers that decide an RTI appeal

Almost nothing here is a legal document. It is a stack of ordinary paper kept in order, and whether it was kept is the difference between an appeal that is heard on its merits and one that is sent back before anybody reads it.

What has to be in the file, from the beginning: the application with its date and its despatch proof, the fee receipt, any intermediate letter the office sent, the reply with its date and the envelope if the postmark matters, the first appeal with its despatch proof, the first appellate order or a note of the date it became due, and a single sheet at the front listing every date in sequence. That sheet takes ten minutes and it is the thing a Commission reads first. Where a document is in a language other than the one the Commission works in, a translation is needed, and where an order has to be proved, a certified copy is worth more than a photocopy.

What we do on an RTI matter

We are a documentation company. We do not appear before the Commission, we do not advise you whether to appeal, and nobody here can tell you what a Commission will decide.

What we decline on an RTI matter

What this costs, said before you start

Every document we draft shows its price on its own service page, and you can read it before you order and before you speak to anybody. Anything payable to a government office — the application fee, copying charges where they are lawfully payable — is shown apart from our charge, because that money is not ours and never passes through us. You hear the whole figure before any work begins, and nothing is payable in advance.

And the sentence that loses us the sale should be the plainest one here. An RTI application is one of the very few legal documents in India that an ordinary person can genuinely write alone. There is no format in the Act, no court fee, no affidavit, no advocate required at any stage before the High Court, and the burden of defending a refusal sits on the officer rather than on you. If your request is straightforward — a copy of your own file, a copy of an order, the status of your own application — take the wording from this page, write it yourself, and file it this week. Come to us when the matter has become an argument about an exemption, or when there is a stack of paper that has to be put in order, or when you simply do not have the time. That is honest work and it is the work we want.

Where this page comes from, and what it deliberately does not say