This is an archive article published on February 1, 2023

‘By nature, governments do not like giving information’: CIC Y K Sinha on RTI Act, its misuse

Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) Y K Sinha said the subversion of Section 23 of the RTI Act by courts was a challenge faced by central and state information commissions.

Providing data on his assertion, Sinha showed that among pending second appeals or complaints of appellants, as many as 113 second appeals by a single appellant were pending and as many as 460 second appeals were pending of two appellants, cumulatively. (File/Twitter: @HCI_London)

By: Express News Service

4 min readAhmedabadFeb 1, 2023 01:12 PM IST First published on: Feb 1, 2023 at 01:12 PM IST

Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) Y K Sinha said that inherently “governments do not like giving information” and some of the most common ways of denying it was to term it as “personal information”. Sinha was speaking at the Gujarat National Law University (GNLU) in Gujarat’s Gandhinagar on Tuesday.

Listing various challenges faced by the central and state information commissions when it comes to the Right to Information (RTI) Act, Sinha bemoaned that the Act is misused and there are people “who survive on filing RTIs” with “vested interests involved”, which in turn “clogs” the system and increases pendency.

Sinha said that public authorities also cite ‘secrecy’ routinely as a way of denying information and that a balance has to be struck in this regard, noting that ‘secrecy’ “cannot be used routinely to deny information”.

“Secrecy is something that you have to decide as a public authority, what is secret and what is not…It cannot be used routinely to deny information. For instance, ‘whether so and so is posted in some place’ and you say ‘this is a national secret, I can’t tell you under Section 8 (1) (a) (of the RTI Act)’, that is incorrect,” the CIC said.

“There are people working in the government and who have problems with their employers…and they file RTIs. In certain departments, 60-70 per cent of the RTIs are filed by such people…When a few people file multiple RTIs, it tends to clog the system,” Sinha said.

The former IFS officer said, “By nature, governments do not like giving information, they try to reveal as little as possible…The most common way of denial is ‘it is personal information’. And it should not be because if you are a public servant, then your postings or educational qualifications, the appellant should know that the said civil servant is a graduate or post graduate…Salaries – that is extremely contentious. You can argue it both ways (privacy versus transparency) but people misuse this information and we are very cautious…We err on the side of caution and we say that the pay scale and gross salaries drawn should be public. Commissioners handle some of these queries differently and that is their right.”

Another challenge, as per Sinha, is constitutional courts passing orders in contravention of Section 23 of the RTI Act. Section 23 deals with the bar of jurisdiction of courts and states that no court shall entertain any suit, application or other proceeding in respect of any order made under this Act and no such order shall be called in question otherwise than by way of an appeal under this Act.

”A lot of courts do not necessarily observe that limitation and they are passing judgments which basically are in contravention of Section 23…(There are) cases where courts intervene and as a result stops the implementation of particular order. Very rarely do the decisions (by state information commissions or CIC) get overturned (but) we see a stay ordered or issued other directives to the commissions…Courts also do that because there is so much pendency. When the courts intervene, they direct, which in my opinion is not exactly as per the Act,” said Sinha.

Citing few such examples, Sinha said that power distribution companies (discoms) were held to be a public authority by the CIC in 2006 but the decision was then stayed by the Delhi High Court in 2010. Similarly, the commission in June 2013 had held political parties as public authorities but the same was stayed. “Obviously no political party likes to be covered under the Act, because you have to be transparent, divulge information,” added Sinha. BCCI too was deemed as a public authority by CIC in 2018 but the same was stayed by Madras High Court.