Frontline: National: Wednesday, 15th October
2025.
Vacant posts, pliant appointees, and penalties in barely 1.2 per cent of cases the transparency law at 20 is a shell of its former self.
The Right to Information
Act, 20 years old this month, lies gasping. What should have been a grand civic
festival has turned into a grim reminder that the RTI regime is in critical
condition an institutional patient on life support.
Enacted in June 2005 under the Congress-led UPA government, the RTI Act was among the most transformative laws of independent India. It created a three-tiered system of accountability through which any citizen, armed with nothing more than a Rs.10 fee or a Below Poverty Line card, could compel answers from the state.
At the top of this pyramid stood the Central Information Commission (CIC), empowered to oversee all Union government public authorities. At the State level, independent State Information Commissions (SIC) mirrored its role.
The architecture of the Act itself carried a radical promise: that the ordinary citizen would stand on equal footing with legislators in questioning power. It was a legal recognition that democracy does not end with voting but begins with the right to know.
However, the citizen’s group Satark Nagrik Sangathan’s “Report Card on the Performance of Information Commissions in India, 2024-25” lays bare this system in steady collapse. This decline has coincided with a political climate increasingly hostile to scrutiny since 2014.
Across India, Information Commissions are vacant, paralysed, or overwhelmed to the point of dysfunction. The findings shock only if one has not watched the last decade’s methodical downgrading of institutions meant to check executive power.
The manpower crunch
The SNS Report Card reveals that 6 out of 28 State Information Commissions Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh, Telangana, Goa, Tripura, and Madhya Pradesh were completely defunct for varying periods between July 2024 and early October 2025, with all Information Commissioner posts lying vacant.
Three commissions, including the CIC itself, are headless, operating without a Chief Information Commissioner. The CIC, which by law can have up to 11 Commissioners, is limping along with just 2 Commissioners.
This deliberate delay in appointments has ensured two outcomes: first, a staggering backlog of appeals and complaints. And second, the long wait to finally get heard at the commission.
As of June 30, over 4.13 lakh cases were pending across the country’s Information Commissions. Maharashtra SIC topped the list at over 95,000 cases, followed by Karnataka SIC at over 47,000 and Tamil Nadu SIC at over 41,000 cases. The CIC has over 24,000 cases. The backlog has steadily climbed each year.
The SNS Report Card states that with current manpower conditions and at current disposal rates, an information request filed in some States would be heard only decades from now.
Telangana SIC would take 29 years to clear its queue an appeal filed on July 1, 2025, would be decided in 2054.
Time is of the essence under the RTI Act. A person enquiring about their ration card or passport cannot be expected to wait for years, let alone decades. Yet that is exactly what the present system demands. The very architecture meant to guarantee time-bound transparency has turned into an edifice of indefinite waiting.
Appointing lackeys
When governments do finally choose to appoint Information Commissioners, either on their own or due to court pressure, the appointees are usually those who have already served the government well: retired bureaucrats, trusted loyalists, and occasionally, political fellow-travellers.
What should be an independent statutory office has become a comfortable post-retirement sinecure.
Consider the appointment of Uday Mahurkar, a former India Today journalist who authored two hagiographic books on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Mahurkar was parachuted into the CIC in 2020, bypassing even the formality of applying for the post.
Such appointments have blunted the independence of the commission.
The CIC that once issued pathbreaking orders holding that political parties fall under the RTI Act, directing Delhi University to allow inspection of records that could reveal the Prime Minister’s degree details, compelling the RBI to disclose the list of top loan defaulters, and declaring that even the Chief Justice’s office is subject to transparency has fallen eerily silent.
The CIC no longer rattles
the bureaucracy. In the past five years, there have been virtually no orders of
public significance compelling disclosure from powerful authorities.
An officer at the Ministry of Law and Justice a year and a half ago said they had not received a single CIC directive ordering disclosure in three years. It was a joke only in tone, not in truth.
The perception of institutional capture is now widespread. Lawyer and author Prashant Reddy, writing in Newslaundry in February 2025, described losing eight of nine RTI cases before the last Chief Information Commissioner of CIC, Heeralal Samariya.
“As a citizen, I no longer have faith in the CIC as an institution,” Reddy wrote. “Its fidelity to the law is suspect; it appears to be answering to higher powers.”
Samariya, who presided over all crucial ministries, including the Prime Minister’s Office, the Home Ministry, and the Supreme Court, passed no notable orders advancing transparency during his tenure.
Instead, the CIC now functions as a second line of defence for public authorities resisting disclosure.
This author’s own experience, and that of many others who have appeared before Samariya and other Information Commissioners, revealed a startling inversion: the Commissioners coming to the rescue of Public Information Officers (PIOs) when they failed to argue effectively against disclosure.
The tough scrutiny that should have been reserved for evasive government departments was done away with. Every case is pre-judged.
A cursory look at the CIC’s website confirms this new normal. Most orders now read like bureaucratic boilerplate citing the same handful of Supreme Court and High Court judgments, often lifted verbatim, to justify withholding information.
These judgments are frequently deployed out of context, as fig leaves for opacity. The dishonesty lies not just in the outcome but in the performance of reasoning: a show of legality masking the quiet burial of a right.
Information Commissioners have now become caretakers of the government’s right to withhold information.
De-teething the tiger
The most direct consequence of appointing pliant or politically indebted Information Commissioners is the quiet burial of the law’s sharpest instrument the power to penalise.
The RTI Act’s most vital safeguard lies in its deterrent clause: the authority of commissions to impose penalties of up to Rs.25,000 or recommend disciplinary action against those PIOs who deny or delay information without justification.
This was the provision that gave the Act its teeth the single feature that transformed it from a symbolic declaration into a law of consequence. Yet, as the SNS Report Card makes clear, those teeth are not being used.
Across the Information Commissions that furnished data from July 2024 to June 2025, penalties were imposed in barely 1.2 per cent of all cases disposed of a mere 1,252 instances. The rest were let off with warnings, advisories, or simply silence.
Several of the largest commissions including the CIC itself, and the SICs of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Karnataka did not even bother to track the number of show-cause notices issued.
It is difficult to imagine a more blatant confession of institutional apathy. The penalty clause was meant to serve as a daily reminder to the bureaucracy that the citizen’s right to know is not optional. Instead, it has been reduced to a dead letter.
Over time, this message calcifies into a culture of unaccountability. Ministries and departments have learned that the easiest way to defeat transparency is to stall, stonewall, or simply ignore.
As the SNS report notes, this non-enforcement has “promoted a culture of impunity”. The law that once made governments tremble at a Rs.10 RTI application now inspires little more than a shrug.
The Supreme Court’s interventions
Transparency activists like Anjali Bhardwaj, Amrita Johri, and retired Commodore Lokesh K. Batra have repeatedly knocked at the Supreme Court’s door seeking time-bound appointments of Information Commissioners.
With a judgment in 2019, the Supreme Court stressed that Information Commissions are vital to the RTI Act and that vacancies must be filled without delay. The court explicitly directed governments to initiate the process one to two months before anticipated vacancies so that there is no gap.
Yet these directives have
been flouted, indicating executive disregard for an accountability institution.
The consequence, as the Supreme Court forewarned in October 2023, is that “the
right of information... becomes a ‘dead letter’ if vacancies are not filled
up”.
In January 2025, a bench of Justices Surya Kant and N. Kotiswar Singh directed the Union government and other States to file an affidavit with clear timelines within which appointments of the Information Commissioners would be made.
In its reply, the Union government stated that the process would be completed in about three months however, that has not happened in nine months.
Crucially, Justice Kant’s bench asked the union to state on affidavit that candidates who had not applied for the post (like Mahurkar) would not be offered appointments.
However, the union stated that the court may not restrict such parachute candidates in the “larger public interest” of choosing “persons of eminence” from other fields. On a side note, there is something very uneasy about a court only nudging the government to do something legally right, instead of ordering it to do so.
Although the case was directed to be listed on March 4, it was not. The matter is now listed for October 27.
This long delay in the court ensuring its own judgment is implemented is worrying. Only an independent judiciary can serve as a crucial ally for transparency, because it is often called upon to interpret exemptions against disclosure contained in the RTI Act, enforce commission’s orders, or direct disclosures in public interest, like it did in the Electoral Bonds case.
Given the legitimate concerns about judicial appointments and executive influence in the court’s workings, there is a clear trend of courts having become increasingly deferential to the Union government. Matters relating to the RTI Act are no exception.
The larger accountability deficit
The health of any transparency regime mirrors the health of democracy itself. In 2018, Sweden-based democracy watchdog V-Dem Institute reclassified India as an “electoral autocracy” a label that has since endured.
When institutions are captured, dissent stifled, and the press tamed, transparency laws suffocate in tandem. The Modi government’s 2019 amendments to the RTI Act stripped Information Commissioners of autonomy by ending their fixed five-year terms and parity with Election Commissioners, allowing the Centre to dictate tenure and pay.
Information Commissioners, aware that their reappointment depends on goodwill, have since learned the art of non-confrontation and discretion.
The 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act deepened this blow erasing the clause that equated citizens with MPs and MLAs, and imposing a sweeping bar on releasing “personal information”, undoing the delicate balance between the right to privacy and the right to know.
The DPDP Act is yet to be notified as rules are still being finalised, and activists and citizens groups are actively campaigning for a pause on these regressive RTI amendments.
Meanwhile, the State routinely withholds data on unemployment, pandemic deaths, pandemic management, even crime, earning the moniker “No Data Available government”.
The social contract in a democracy holds that the government is accountable to the governed. A decline in transparency is a clear indicator that this contract is being dishonoured. It is a symptom of a larger malaise.
As global experiences from regressing democracies have shown, citizens feel alienated when they perceive that the government is dishonouring that social contract that it no longer listens to them or justifies its actions.
The RTI was one avenue for citizens to demand answers and perceive the health of that social contract. If that avenue continues to be blocked, the already mounting frustration in all quarters, including the middle class, can either turn to apathy or to mass unrest.
(Saurav Das is an investigative journalist writing on law, judiciary, crime, and policy.)
Vacant posts, pliant appointees, and penalties in barely 1.2 per cent of cases the transparency law at 20 is a shell of its former self.
 |
| A group of NGOs and RTI activists protesting the proposed changes in the RTI (Amendment) Bill, in Thane, Maharashtra, on July 25, 2019. Photo Credit: VIBHAV BIRWATKAR |
Enacted in June 2005 under the Congress-led UPA government, the RTI Act was among the most transformative laws of independent India. It created a three-tiered system of accountability through which any citizen, armed with nothing more than a Rs.10 fee or a Below Poverty Line card, could compel answers from the state.
At the top of this pyramid stood the Central Information Commission (CIC), empowered to oversee all Union government public authorities. At the State level, independent State Information Commissions (SIC) mirrored its role.
The architecture of the Act itself carried a radical promise: that the ordinary citizen would stand on equal footing with legislators in questioning power. It was a legal recognition that democracy does not end with voting but begins with the right to know.
However, the citizen’s group Satark Nagrik Sangathan’s “Report Card on the Performance of Information Commissions in India, 2024-25” lays bare this system in steady collapse. This decline has coincided with a political climate increasingly hostile to scrutiny since 2014.
Across India, Information Commissions are vacant, paralysed, or overwhelmed to the point of dysfunction. The findings shock only if one has not watched the last decade’s methodical downgrading of institutions meant to check executive power.
The manpower crunch
The SNS Report Card reveals that 6 out of 28 State Information Commissions Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh, Telangana, Goa, Tripura, and Madhya Pradesh were completely defunct for varying periods between July 2024 and early October 2025, with all Information Commissioner posts lying vacant.
Three commissions, including the CIC itself, are headless, operating without a Chief Information Commissioner. The CIC, which by law can have up to 11 Commissioners, is limping along with just 2 Commissioners.
This deliberate delay in appointments has ensured two outcomes: first, a staggering backlog of appeals and complaints. And second, the long wait to finally get heard at the commission.
As of June 30, over 4.13 lakh cases were pending across the country’s Information Commissions. Maharashtra SIC topped the list at over 95,000 cases, followed by Karnataka SIC at over 47,000 and Tamil Nadu SIC at over 41,000 cases. The CIC has over 24,000 cases. The backlog has steadily climbed each year.
The SNS Report Card states that with current manpower conditions and at current disposal rates, an information request filed in some States would be heard only decades from now.
Telangana SIC would take 29 years to clear its queue an appeal filed on July 1, 2025, would be decided in 2054.
Time is of the essence under the RTI Act. A person enquiring about their ration card or passport cannot be expected to wait for years, let alone decades. Yet that is exactly what the present system demands. The very architecture meant to guarantee time-bound transparency has turned into an edifice of indefinite waiting.
Appointing lackeys
When governments do finally choose to appoint Information Commissioners, either on their own or due to court pressure, the appointees are usually those who have already served the government well: retired bureaucrats, trusted loyalists, and occasionally, political fellow-travellers.
What should be an independent statutory office has become a comfortable post-retirement sinecure.
Consider the appointment of Uday Mahurkar, a former India Today journalist who authored two hagiographic books on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Mahurkar was parachuted into the CIC in 2020, bypassing even the formality of applying for the post.
Such appointments have blunted the independence of the commission.
The CIC that once issued pathbreaking orders holding that political parties fall under the RTI Act, directing Delhi University to allow inspection of records that could reveal the Prime Minister’s degree details, compelling the RBI to disclose the list of top loan defaulters, and declaring that even the Chief Justice’s office is subject to transparency has fallen eerily silent.
 |
| Prashant Bhushan, advocate Supreme Court (extreme right) along with Nikhil Dey of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (2nd right), Anjali Bhardwaj, co-convenor of National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (3rd right), and Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty, vice president of Press Club of India (extreme left) addressing a press conference on the impact of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act on people’s right to information and press freedom at Press Club of India, in New Delhi, on July 30, 2025. | Photo Credit: SHIV KUMAR PUSHPAKAR |
An officer at the Ministry of Law and Justice a year and a half ago said they had not received a single CIC directive ordering disclosure in three years. It was a joke only in tone, not in truth.
The perception of institutional capture is now widespread. Lawyer and author Prashant Reddy, writing in Newslaundry in February 2025, described losing eight of nine RTI cases before the last Chief Information Commissioner of CIC, Heeralal Samariya.
“As a citizen, I no longer have faith in the CIC as an institution,” Reddy wrote. “Its fidelity to the law is suspect; it appears to be answering to higher powers.”
Samariya, who presided over all crucial ministries, including the Prime Minister’s Office, the Home Ministry, and the Supreme Court, passed no notable orders advancing transparency during his tenure.
Instead, the CIC now functions as a second line of defence for public authorities resisting disclosure.
This author’s own experience, and that of many others who have appeared before Samariya and other Information Commissioners, revealed a startling inversion: the Commissioners coming to the rescue of Public Information Officers (PIOs) when they failed to argue effectively against disclosure.
The tough scrutiny that should have been reserved for evasive government departments was done away with. Every case is pre-judged.
A cursory look at the CIC’s website confirms this new normal. Most orders now read like bureaucratic boilerplate citing the same handful of Supreme Court and High Court judgments, often lifted verbatim, to justify withholding information.
These judgments are frequently deployed out of context, as fig leaves for opacity. The dishonesty lies not just in the outcome but in the performance of reasoning: a show of legality masking the quiet burial of a right.
Information Commissioners have now become caretakers of the government’s right to withhold information.
De-teething the tiger
The most direct consequence of appointing pliant or politically indebted Information Commissioners is the quiet burial of the law’s sharpest instrument the power to penalise.
The RTI Act’s most vital safeguard lies in its deterrent clause: the authority of commissions to impose penalties of up to Rs.25,000 or recommend disciplinary action against those PIOs who deny or delay information without justification.
This was the provision that gave the Act its teeth the single feature that transformed it from a symbolic declaration into a law of consequence. Yet, as the SNS Report Card makes clear, those teeth are not being used.
Across the Information Commissions that furnished data from July 2024 to June 2025, penalties were imposed in barely 1.2 per cent of all cases disposed of a mere 1,252 instances. The rest were let off with warnings, advisories, or simply silence.
Several of the largest commissions including the CIC itself, and the SICs of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Karnataka did not even bother to track the number of show-cause notices issued.
It is difficult to imagine a more blatant confession of institutional apathy. The penalty clause was meant to serve as a daily reminder to the bureaucracy that the citizen’s right to know is not optional. Instead, it has been reduced to a dead letter.
Over time, this message calcifies into a culture of unaccountability. Ministries and departments have learned that the easiest way to defeat transparency is to stall, stonewall, or simply ignore.
As the SNS report notes, this non-enforcement has “promoted a culture of impunity”. The law that once made governments tremble at a Rs.10 RTI application now inspires little more than a shrug.
The Supreme Court’s interventions
Transparency activists like Anjali Bhardwaj, Amrita Johri, and retired Commodore Lokesh K. Batra have repeatedly knocked at the Supreme Court’s door seeking time-bound appointments of Information Commissioners.
With a judgment in 2019, the Supreme Court stressed that Information Commissions are vital to the RTI Act and that vacancies must be filled without delay. The court explicitly directed governments to initiate the process one to two months before anticipated vacancies so that there is no gap.
 |
| RTI activists staging a protest in front of Town Hall in Bangalore on October 15, 2014. | Photo Credit: K. BHAGYA PRAKASH |
In January 2025, a bench of Justices Surya Kant and N. Kotiswar Singh directed the Union government and other States to file an affidavit with clear timelines within which appointments of the Information Commissioners would be made.
In its reply, the Union government stated that the process would be completed in about three months however, that has not happened in nine months.
Crucially, Justice Kant’s bench asked the union to state on affidavit that candidates who had not applied for the post (like Mahurkar) would not be offered appointments.
However, the union stated that the court may not restrict such parachute candidates in the “larger public interest” of choosing “persons of eminence” from other fields. On a side note, there is something very uneasy about a court only nudging the government to do something legally right, instead of ordering it to do so.
Although the case was directed to be listed on March 4, it was not. The matter is now listed for October 27.
This long delay in the court ensuring its own judgment is implemented is worrying. Only an independent judiciary can serve as a crucial ally for transparency, because it is often called upon to interpret exemptions against disclosure contained in the RTI Act, enforce commission’s orders, or direct disclosures in public interest, like it did in the Electoral Bonds case.
Given the legitimate concerns about judicial appointments and executive influence in the court’s workings, there is a clear trend of courts having become increasingly deferential to the Union government. Matters relating to the RTI Act are no exception.
The larger accountability deficit
The health of any transparency regime mirrors the health of democracy itself. In 2018, Sweden-based democracy watchdog V-Dem Institute reclassified India as an “electoral autocracy” a label that has since endured.
When institutions are captured, dissent stifled, and the press tamed, transparency laws suffocate in tandem. The Modi government’s 2019 amendments to the RTI Act stripped Information Commissioners of autonomy by ending their fixed five-year terms and parity with Election Commissioners, allowing the Centre to dictate tenure and pay.
Information Commissioners, aware that their reappointment depends on goodwill, have since learned the art of non-confrontation and discretion.
The 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act deepened this blow erasing the clause that equated citizens with MPs and MLAs, and imposing a sweeping bar on releasing “personal information”, undoing the delicate balance between the right to privacy and the right to know.
The DPDP Act is yet to be notified as rules are still being finalised, and activists and citizens groups are actively campaigning for a pause on these regressive RTI amendments.
Meanwhile, the State routinely withholds data on unemployment, pandemic deaths, pandemic management, even crime, earning the moniker “No Data Available government”.
The social contract in a democracy holds that the government is accountable to the governed. A decline in transparency is a clear indicator that this contract is being dishonoured. It is a symptom of a larger malaise.
As global experiences from regressing democracies have shown, citizens feel alienated when they perceive that the government is dishonouring that social contract that it no longer listens to them or justifies its actions.
The RTI was one avenue for citizens to demand answers and perceive the health of that social contract. If that avenue continues to be blocked, the already mounting frustration in all quarters, including the middle class, can either turn to apathy or to mass unrest.
(Saurav Das is an investigative journalist writing on law, judiciary, crime, and policy.)
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