The Statutory Design and Its Escape Hatch

The Act's basic structure sounds good. Section 3 guarantees citizens a right to information, and Section 8 lists ten narrow exemptions, national security, cabinet papers, commercial confidence, fiduciary relationships, and personal privacy being among them, subject to a public-interest override under Section 8(2), which permits disclosure even of exempted material where the public interest in disclosure outweighs the harm. The Central Information Commission (CIC), however, has had to repeatedly intervene just to enforce the basics, that access is the rule and exemption the exception and that a denial must be reasoned rather than just asserted, which clearly shows that in practice this override is rarely being tested. In one such case, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs refused an applicant access to a copy of his recorded statement, relying on Section 8(1)(h) without giving any explanation as to how the disclosure would be a hindrance to any investigation; the Commission set the denial aside precisely because citing an exemption is not, by itself, a justification. This captures the deeper problem: the law is not being violated so much as being played with.

Patterns of Procedural Evasion

The public authorities have established an identifiable list of methods to respond to an RTI application without answering it.

The most common is the missing-file defence - a response simply stating that the requested record is “not traceable,” “misplaced,” or “scattered.” The CIC has held repeatedly that non-traceability is not a recognised exemption at all, and that a missing file is itself evidence of a public authority's failure to maintain records as required under the Public Records Act, 1993. A subtler variant of this is the flat “no such information exists” reply even to matters of clear institutional record: when a citizen asked in 2024 whether the President had ever returned a Cabinet decision for reconsideration, Rashtrapati Bhavan's reply was simply that no such information was available — an answer that neither confirmed nor denied the substance of the query, and one nearly identical to a reply given to a different applicant asking the same question of a previous President's office. In some cases even the procedure has had similar effect, online portals have declined to forward applications to departments which are not yet “onboarded” to a digital system, in apparent tension with Section 6(3)'s of five-day transfer requirement. And since no dedicated mechanism exists to penalise non-compliance, Section 4(1)(b)'s obligation to proactively publish seventeen categories of information, precisely so citizens need not file individual requests, remains the least-enforced provision in the Act. None of these methods will require an officer to defy the law. And still each one exploits the gap between what the Act requires procedurally and what it fails to require substantively.

The 2023 Amendment to Section 8(1)(j)

The most important development, however, is not administrative improvisation but a legislative one. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 amended Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act, replacing a detailed, multi-part provision with a six-word exemption covering personal information. The original clause permitted personal information to be withheld only when it had no relation to public activity or if amounted to an unwarranted invasion of privacy while also carrying a proviso stating that nothing deniable to Parliament could be denied to a citizen either. Former Central Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi argues that the amended clause drops this point entirely, and that if the DPDP Act's own expansive definition of “person” which covers firms, companies, and associations and not merely individuals is read into the RTI exemption, then almost any record can plausibly be labelled personal and withheld. Since the DPDP Act simultaneously imposes penalties for wrongful disclosure, PIOs face an asymmetric incentive: an unjustified denial risks a modest penalty under the RTI Act, while an improper disclosure risks a far larger one under the DPDP Act - an incentive structure that, Gandhi argues, pushes officers toward reflexive refusal.

Under the original provision, an authority holding personal information still had to show that the disclosure served no larger public interest which was a case-by-case weighing exercise that placed the burden of justifying secrecy on the state. Journalist Kurian Mathew argues that the amended provision actually inverts this completely: an official can now classify a record as personal and decline to engage with the public-interest question at all, which shifts the practical burden on the applicant to disprove a classification the law no longer requires the state to defend.

A Competing Rationale: Privacy Protection

The DPDP Act did not appear out of nowhere. It followed the Supreme Court's 2017 recognition of privacy as a fundamental right in Puttaswamy, which pushed Parliament toward a dedicated data protection framework. RTI's critics on this point are not wrong that the Act has, in practice, been used as a workaround for exactly the kind of personal-data disclosure a privacy regime is meant to prevent - including applications that are aimed less at institutional accountability and more at extracting a private individual's address, service history, or family details for use in a personal dispute. A narrower, harder-edged personal-information exemption has a real case behind it. What that case doesn't answer is why the fix required removing the balancing test altogether rather than tightening it, Section 8(2) could have been preserved for personal information genuinely tied to public duties (an official's asset disclosures, a contractor's conflict-of-interest filing) while still closing the door on the inappropriate use case. Instead, the amendment removed the mechanism that distinguished the two.

Why Vagueness Carries Less Risk Than Refusal

Contextually hollow replies that conform to the letter of the law allow an officer to parry potential political attacks that are almost guaranteed to accompany an accurate report. It is, however, important to note that the issue runs deeper along institutional lines rather than being a tale of individually corrupt officers. Vague answers bear no repercussions beyond public disgruntlement, compared to backlash that can come from both the masses and their official superiors in response to controversial responses or silence. Since the RTI Act's penalty provisions under Section 20 were designed to punish outright refusal and unreasonable delay, they are poorly calibrated to catch the quieter offence of an answer that is technically timely but devoid of substance.

None of this required Parliament to repeal the RTI Act, and none of it shows up as a single dramatic act of censorship. It shows up instead as a missing file here, a “no information available” reply there, an exemption clause invoked without explanation, and finally a statutory amendment that removes the very language commissions once used to test such claims. The task facing RTI's next generation of reformers, then, is not to win back the right to ask, but to define and enforce, what counts as an actual answer.

Author is a 2^nd Year Law student at Dharmashastra National Law University, Jabalpur. Views are personal.