Frontline Magazine: Article: Wednesday, 13 May 2026.
For over 18 years, Saleem
Baig has used the RTI Act to prise open files in every State. The reply has
been jail, false cases, and a life in hiding—and a new amendment may soon make
his work impossible.
 |
Several queries of RTI
activist Saleem Baige have forced authorities to reverse decisions, and have
led to action against errant officials. | Photo Credit: Facebook |
Saleem Baig lives on the
third floor of a cramped 2BHK flat in a congested pocket of New Delhi, with his
wife and three sons. He pays Rs.15,000 a month in rent. He keeps to himself,
barely knows his neighbours, and does not list this address on the documents he
files. Every few weeks—sometimes two or three times in a month—he travels to
Moradabad to sit through court hearings in cases the police filed against him
nearly two decades ago.
Baig, 58, is what India’s
bureaucracy and its critics both call an “RTI man”. Since the Right to
Information Act came into force in October 2005, he says he has filed roughly
20,000 applications across nearly every State and Union Territory, and with the
Prime Minister’s Office. Several of his queries have forced authorities to
reverse decisions, and have led to action against errant officials.
The price has been high
and heavy. He has been jailed in what the courts have since found to be
fabricated cases, gone underground for stretches totalling two and a half
years, sold the family’s belongings and his wife’s jewellery, shut down the
brass business that supported them, watched his children pulled out of school,
and abandoned his hometown. He now lives, by his own description, as a private
and secret man.
“I have been harassed for
asking RTI questions—by the police, by local politicians, by anti-social
elements,” Baig said. “I have been underground, jailed in a fake case, and
changed living places many times because of arrest, fear and threats.”
The RTI Act, passed by
Parliament in 2005, lays down rules and procedures for citizens seeking
government information. It mandates timely responses, allows inspection of
records and the supply of certified copies, and applies to every public
authority funded by taxpayers. For nearly two decades, it has been used by
farmers, slum-dwellers, journalists and activists to extract everything from
ration entitlements to information on public works.
Baig is from Bhojpur, a
village 20 km from Moradabad in western Uttar Pradesh, about 180 km from the
national capital. He holds a master’s degree in Urdu (1990) from M.J.P.
Ruhelkhand University and a certificate course in human rights from the Indira
Gandhi National Open University. In 2007, he contested the Uttar Pradesh
Assembly election from Moradabad Rural on a National Loktantrik Party ticket.
He lost, and went back to filing RTIs.
His two-storey house in
Bhojpur now stands abandoned. Rain has damaged the roof. A neighbour recently
asked him to repair it. “I don’t have the money,” Baig said, scrolling through
a video of the ruined building on his phone. “How can I repair it?”
His brass business in
Moradabad—India’s “Peetal Nagri”, which accounts for the bulk of the country’s
brassware exports—was wound up after his arrest in 2008 and the long
underground period that followed. A Hindi fortnightly he founded the same year,
Nature Watch, was meant to publish his RTI replies in their original form, free
of editorial trimming. “Sometimes journalists also modify news in their own
sense,” he said. He refused outside funding, fearing it would compromise his
work, and the paper closed in 2016 after two earlier suspensions. He says he
still has the title and the RNI number, and hopes to revive it.
The application that
changed everything
Baig began filing RTIs
soon after the law came into force. The trouble started in February 2007, when
he filed an application at the local Moradabad police station seeking
caste-wise data on police recruitment in his area. He suspected the selection
process had been rigged.
According to Baig, the
police did not provide the information and instead asked him to deposit
Rs.58,000 to retrieve it. He challenged the demand before the Uttar Pradesh
State Information Commission. The commission, he says, found irregularities in
the recruitment process, imposed a fine of Rs.25,000 on Superintendent of
Police Moradabad (rural) Kush har Saurabh and SSP Prem Prakash, and directed
that the information be furnished.
When the police still did
not comply, the State Information Commissioner ordered that Rs.6,000 in
compensation be deducted from the SSP’s salary and paid to Baig. “First they
asked me to come to the police station to collect it,” he said. “When I refused,
they posted a cheque. But they still did not give me the full information I had
asked for.”
That order, in his
telling, marked him out. Soon, relatives, police officers, local politicians
and middlemen began pressuring him to withdraw the case. He says he was
attacked two or three times and escaped narrowly. He informed the Commission of
the threats and refused to step back.
In June 2008, he was
arrested in Moradabad on charges of theft and extortion. He spent 18 days in
jail before being released. A second First Information Report was filed against
him almost immediately. “They were all bogus cases,” Baig said. “One has since
been quashed by the court. In another, the man who was supposed to be the
complainant told the court he had never met me before that hearing, and that he
had been forced by the police to file the case. Before my RTI work, there was
not a single case against me or my family.”
He went underground three
times over the next two and a half years, moving between Lucknow and other
towns. His lawyer, he says, warned him that the police were considering
invoking the National Security Act—a 1980 preventive-detention law that allows
the State to hold a person without trial for up to 12 months on grounds of
“public order” or “national security”, and which civil-liberties groups have
repeatedly criticised for its use against activists, journalists and political
opponents.
During this period, he
says, the police circulated word that anyone who helped him would also face
cases. Friends drifted away. Only his family stayed.
 |
RTI activist Saleem Baig.
| Photo Credit: Facebook |
Even underground, Baig
kept filing. His applications, by his account, exposed irregularities in the
Indira Awas Yojana in parts of Uttar Pradesh, where only six of 53 sanctioned
houses had been allotted in one cluster; gaps in the Prime Minister’s 15-Point
Programme for Minorities, which he found was not functioning in several
districts; minority-welfare budgets in 21 UP districts that had lapsed unspent;
and what he describes as irregularities in Waqf Board accounts and a Unani
medical college.
His queries also covered
the maintenance of the Taj Mahal, RBI loans, UGC-aided colleges, the authorship
of PMO press releases, his own salary, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act
and custodial deaths. A Public Interest Litigation he filed, Saleem Baig Vs.
State Of U.P., he says, led to a court setting aside a decision of the Mayawati
government which outed “vigilance information” from RTI in Uttar Pradesh.
The cases against Baig
followed his family through every government office. Routine paperwork—school
certificates, block-level documentation, files moving from local councils to
the Centre—slowed or stopped. Local councillors and officers, he says, treated
him as a marked man because his queries about roads, sanitation and welfare
schemes embarrassed them.
“My income had dried up,”
he said. “Expenses kept rising—travel, lawyers’ fees. We had already sold our
belongings. My wife sold her jewellery. My children’s schooling stopped for two
years. Other children would ask them, ‘Why does the police come to your house?
Your father is bad.’ So I shifted them to my father-in-law’s home.”
“My younger son used to
ask his mother, ‘Ammi, why does the police come again and again?’” Baig said.
“When my wife told me on the phone that he was asking, ‘Ammi, hum school kab
jayenge’—when will we go to school—my heart used to tremble.”
Admissions and
certificates required the help of a local MLA or MP. “I was already on their
target,” he said. “I could not approach any of them.”
A weakening law
Baig says the squeeze on
RTI applicants has tightened in the last four or five years. Information that
once arrived in 30 days, he says, now does not arrive at all, or arrives so
heavily redacted as to be useless.
“I now get calls from the
PMO, from the Minority Affairs Ministry, from other institutions, asking me,
‘Who are you? Why do you want to know this?’” he said. “Under the RTI Act, no
one is allowed to ask me that. The State Information Commission in Uttar Pradesh
has all but collapsed. It is failing to deliver justice.”
His larger fear is the
change to the law itself. Section 44(3) of the Digital Personal Data Protection
Act, 2023, amends Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act to exempt all “personal
information” from disclosure, removing the public-interest override that was previously
available. Civil society groups, former Information Commissioners and more than
120 opposition MPs have written to the government demanding a rollback, arguing
that the change creates a blanket privacy shield that public officials and
politicians can hide behind.
“After this amendment,
getting information will be almost impossible,” Baig said.
“Already, the Act has been
weakening. The government does not want corruption to stop—it is sheltering it.
Right now, officers are afraid of RTI.
 |
| At a
protest against changes to the RTI Act at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, on July 29,
2019. | Photo Credit: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar |
More than 30
organisations—including the Internet Freedom Foundation, the National Campaign
for People’s Right to Information, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, Satark
Nagrik Sangathan and Common Cause—have demanded that the amendment be
withdrawn. There were brief
reprieves. Between 2011 and 2014, the Dalit Foundation gave him a fellowship of
Rs.7,000 a month to document atrocities against Dalits and minorities. From
2012, ActionAid India supported him with Rs.15,000 a month for six years, and
later took him on as a staff member until December 2022. “That support kept us
alive,” Baig said.
The Delhi Minority
Commission has given him a lifetime achievement award. He served on a
fact-finding team that documented the February 2020 Delhi violence. Civil
society groups have invited him to train new RTI applicants.
That income has now also
dried up. The pandemic ended his training assignments and pushed him into debt.
The proposed amendment has further reduced demand. He survives on his eldest
son’s salary.
A risk that does not
appear in any contract
The work has long carried
a physical cost. According to data compiled by the Commonwealth Human Rights
Initiative (CHRI), over 100 RTI applicants have been killed since 2006, while
180 have been assaulted and 187 threatened. CHRI estimates that, on average, 28
RTI users have been threatened, assaulted or killed every year since the Act
came into force.
Baig says no government,
Central or State, has shown any sustained interest in the safety of RTI
applicants. “By filing RTI, we are helping the State be aware of its own
policies,” he said. “But RTI activists are being killed in this country, and no
government, no officer, is concerned about their safety.”
His current docket
includes applications on the Waqf Board and on properties classified as “enemy
property” under the Enemy Property Act. “I will keep filing RTIs as long as the
Act exists,” Baig said. “Before the RTI, I used to file PILs, but those take
much longer. The RTI is faster. Through it, files that have been invisible for
years become visible.”
“We vote once in five
years,” he said. “We can file an RTI every day. As a citizen, I feel honoured
when I am the one asking the question of the Prime Minister or the Chief
Minister. I want to ask people to use this Act. It gives us an ehsas—a
feeling—of our freedom, of being alive.”
Muhammad Tahir is a
Delhi-based journalist. He has worked various media organisations including The
Caravan, Newslaundry. He writes on several issues and mainly focuses on human
rights, minority and marginalised societies issues.
An RTI application filed
by Nagpur-based activist Abhay Kolarkar has revealed staggering figures related
to unclaimed bank deposits, fraud complaints and banking grievances across the
country, once again drawing attention to the growing pile of idle money lying
unclaimed in the banking system.
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