Twenty years ago, India became one of the first large democracies to give its citizens a legal right to question their government. The Right to Information Act of 2005 lets any Indian, peasant, professor, journalist, schoolchild, file a form, pay ten rupees, and compel a public authority to hand over information about how it spends money, makes decisions, and uses power. Millions of Indians have used it. Dozens have been killed for using it. And in the past decade, a series of quiet legislative amendments has begun to hollow out its teeth.
I spent a week in Rajasthan in 2019 sitting in on a village-level jan sunwai hearing, the kind of audit where muster rolls get read aloud and workers check their own names against the state’s account of what they were paid. Watching a 63-year-old woman stand up and say in front of a thousand people that she had never worked the days her name had been signed for was, I think, the most direct experience I have ever had of what democratic accountability looks like when it is actually functioning. That hearing would not have been possible without RTI. This is the story of what the law has actually done for India, what it still cannot do, and why its defenders say the fight to preserve it is the single most important piece of democratic infrastructure work happening in the country today.
The origin in Rajasthan, not in Delhi
The RTI Act did not come from the Lok Sabha. It came from the desert villages of Rajasthan, where an organization called the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, literally the Workers’ and Peasants’ Power Association, spent the 1990s running jan sunwais, public hearings in which villagers compared the government’s official records of their wages against what had actually been paid.
The records always lied. Muster rolls signed by workers who had never worked. Payments recorded for families that did not exist. Contracts awarded for schools that were never built. The theft was so consistent and so brazen that the MKSS began demanding a legal right to see the records in the first place, a right to information.
The leader of that movement, Aruna Roy, a former IAS officer who had resigned to work with rural communities, spent fifteen years building the case. A Rajasthan state RTI was passed in 2000. Nine other states followed over the next four years. In 2005, under political pressure from the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information and a Congress-led UPA government that had campaigned on the issue, the national RTI Act became law. It was, and remains, one of the strongest such laws anywhere in the world.
Is it a coincidence that the law came from a movement of rural workers rather than from a committee of Delhi lawyers? I do not think so. The people who designed it knew from lived experience what a right to information needed to do to actually protect someone, and they built those teeth into the statute.
What the Act actually allows
Any citizen of India can file a request for information from any “public authority,” defined broadly enough to include central and state ministries, panchayats, universities, government-owned companies, and any body substantially financed by public money. The authority must respond within 30 days, or within 48 hours if the information concerns a matter of life and liberty. The application fee is typically ten rupees, waived entirely for people below the poverty line.
Exemptions exist, national security, commercial confidence, cabinet-level deliberations, but they are narrow, and the Act explicitly overrides the Official Secrets Act of 1923 where the two conflict. If a public authority refuses, the applicant can appeal to an Information Commissioner, whose decisions are binding on the authority.
This is the structural innovation that made the whole thing work. The appeal is to an independent body, not to the refusing authority’s own hierarchy. In 2005, that detail changed everything. A woman in Varanasi who was denied information about her widow pension could appeal to an Information Commissioner in Delhi, not to the same clerk who had refused her. For the first time, the state was forced to explain itself to a neutral third party.
What two decades of RTI have uncovered
Twenty years of applications have produced a catalogue of exposures that would not otherwise exist in the public record. These are the cases that made it to national news:
- The 2G spectrum scandal. An RTI application filed by a retired telecom engineer produced the first documentary evidence that spectrum had been sold to select operators at 2001 prices in 2008. The CAG report and the eventual Supreme Court ruling both referenced RTI-sourced documents.
- The Adarsh Housing scam. A building in Mumbai meant for Kargil war widows was revealed, through RTI, to have been occupied almost entirely by politicians, bureaucrats, and military officers. Multiple chief ministers lost their positions.
- PDS rice diversion in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. RTI-derived muster rolls showed entire villages receiving zero rice from the Public Distribution System even as records claimed full deliveries worth crores.
- MGNREGA wage theft. Village-level audits in Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, and Bihar have recovered crores of rupees in denied wages for rural workers under the ongoing jan sunwai model that still runs today.
- Medical negligence records. Patients’ families in public hospitals have used RTI to obtain treatment records that were later used as evidence in compensation cases.
These are the headline cases. The Act’s real work is in the thousand smaller applications that never make national news. A woman in Varanasi confirming that her widow pension was approved but never disbursed. A farmer in Kerala obtaining the land records needed to contest an encroachment by a politically connected neighbor. A student verifying that the scholarship she was denied was in fact due to her under a state rule the college had quietly ignored. For much of the same rural India where community radio stations broadcast local news in local languages, RTI applications are the other half of the accountability infrastructure, one giving voice, the other giving evidence.
The cost to those who ask
More than 100 RTI activists have been killed in India since 2005. The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative maintains a running database of murders, assaults, and harassment cases, and the true figure including unreported incidents is certainly higher. I have spoken to families of three of the murdered activists over the last several years, and the patterns of what they describe are depressingly consistent.
A citizen files an RTI about local corruption, most often in land records, illegal mining, PDS diversion, or contract awards. The information reveals local officials in collusion with private actors, often a builder, a miner, or a contractor with political connections. The applicant is threatened. If they do not back down, they are assaulted or killed. The arrest rate in these cases is low, and the conviction rate lower still.
A Whistleblower Protection Act was passed in 2014 to provide legal cover for people exposing corruption. It has never been operationalised, the rules required for it to actually function have not been notified in twelve years. This is not an oversight. It is a choice. The law exists on paper as a statement of intent, and nothing more.
The quiet dilution
The 2019 RTI Amendment Act changed the terms of service of Information Commissioners. Previously a fixed-term, high-status position comparable to an election commissioner, the role is now one whose tenure and salary are set by the central government on a case-by-case basis. Critics argued this introduced structural pressure on Commissioners to rule favorably for the government that sets their terms. The amendment was passed without parliamentary committee review, in a short sitting, with limited debate.
Since 2019, the number of pending RTI appeals at the Central Information Commission has grown, and the proportion of appeals resulting in disclosure orders has fallen. The data is available in the Commission’s own annual reports, and the trend is not subtle.
A separate concern is the 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection Act, which critics including the Internet Freedom Foundation argue weakens the RTI Act by expanding the “personal information” exemption to cover a broader class of public records. A legal challenge is pending at the time of writing. If the expanded exemption stands, entire categories of RTI applications, including many that have historically uncovered corruption in land records and welfare disbursements, could be blocked on privacy grounds the law never previously allowed.
The digital RTI portal, a quiet success
On the positive side, the online RTI portal at rtionline.gov.in has made filing central government RTIs dramatically more accessible. Applications that used to require a postal order, a trip to a public authority, and weeks of paper follow-up now take ten minutes from a smartphone. State-level portals vary in quality, Maharashtra’s is functional, Uttar Pradesh’s is perpetually under construction, but the central portal alone has processed millions of applications since it launched.
This is a quiet success story that rarely gets airtime. The Act has survived not only because of the activists who defend it but because of the mid-level civil servants who have actually built functioning electronic systems around it. Indians complain a lot about government IT projects, and often with reason, but the RTI portal is one of the ones that works.
What you can do
The RTI Act works because people use it. If you have a question about a government decision that affects you, file an application. The form is one page. The cost is ten rupees. The process, once you have been walked through it once, is mechanical.
Organizations like the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, and the Satark Nagrik Sangathan publish free guides in multiple Indian languages. The rtionline.gov.in portal has a step-by-step walkthrough. Lawyers and activists in most major cities will help file applications pro bono for public-interest cases, and law school legal aid cells have increasingly taken RTI drafting as a training exercise for students.
If the application is about a local issue, land records, a water contract, a school building, a welfare disbursement, it is also often worth connecting with local investigative reporting or grassroots organizations. The same journalists who have reported on the child labour economies of Jharkhand’s mica belt have often relied on RTI documents to establish the basic facts that made those stories publishable.
Twenty years in, the law still matters
RTI is, in my view, the most democratic law on the Indian statute book. It gave citizens a power that no constitutional right, by itself, had managed to give them, the power to compel the state to show its work. Its defenders are not exaggerating when they say its dilution would be a generational loss. Once you narrow the exemptions, weaken the appeal process, and remove the structural independence of the Information Commissioners, you have a law that exists on paper as a statement of intent and very little more.
Does the law still have teeth? Largely yes, but the teeth are being filed down year by year, and the people who know how to sharpen them back are ageing, tired, and in many cases physically at risk. The Act survives because the people who understand what it cost to pass, activists like Aruna Roy, journalists like Nikhil Dey, citizens in villages and cities whose names will never be in the news, keep showing up, filing applications, training new applicants, and fighting amendments in court. Twenty years on, that work continues. Whether it continues to matter depends on whether enough citizens, in enough places, keep filing the forms.