A pension file can sit in an office for months without moving, and the person who depends on that pension is often the last to learn why. The file exists, the noting exists, the order that stopped or delayed payment exists, yet none of it is visible from outside the office where it is held. Learning how to file an RTI application begins in precisely that situation, with a record that a government office holds and a citizen who needs to see it. The same shape recurs across ordinary dealings with the state. A ration card decision is taken somewhere, on some paper, for some reason recorded at the time. An application is rejected, and the rejection rests on a noting, an inspection, a report, or an order that the applicant has never been shown. In each case the difficulty is not a lack of entitlement to the record.

That framing carries the whole application, and it rests on a claim that can be stated plainly at the outset. Ask for a record, not an answer. The single most reliable predictor of success under the Right to Information Act, 2005 is whether the application asks for a document that exists rather than a question that must be answered. An office can retrieve a register, copy an order, and produce a noting because those things are already in its custody, in a form that an officer can locate and hand over. An office asked to explain itself, to justify a delay, or to say when a grievance will be resolved is being asked to compose something that does not yet exist, and a request framed in that way invites a vague reply or a refusal on the ground that no such information is held. A question invites a reply composed for the occasion, shaped by the person replying. A record request compels production of material created before the request arrived, in the ordinary course of the office’s own work, whose contents cannot be adjusted for the applicant’s benefit or disadvantage.

The statute was designed to be operable by an ordinary citizen, and that design intention runs through the provisions that govern who may ask, what may be asked for, and how the asking is done. There is no requirement of legal training, no requirement of representation, and no requirement that the applicant demonstrate a grievance in any particular form before the right can be exercised. The form of the request is deliberately plain. The fee is prescribed rather than negotiated. The language of the request may be the language of the area in which the application is made. Assistance is owed to a requester who cannot put the request into writing. None of this resembles litigation, and none of it resembles a petition to authority in the older sense, where the supplicant set out a case and waited for grace. The applicant under this Act exercises a right given by Parliament to citizens, and the officer who receives the application performs a function defined by the same statute, not a favour conferred by the office.

If the machinery is plain, the failures are rarely failures of machinery. The difficulties lie in framing and follow-through, not in the form. Framing means translating a lived problem, experienced as delay, silence, or unfairness, into the language of records, which is the only language the Act reliably speaks. A pension that has stopped is a hardship, but the Act does not restore pensions. What the Act supplies is the payment register, the order by which payment was stopped, and the report on which that order relied, and those documents give the pensioner something solid with which to pursue restoration through the channels that hold that power. Follow-through means treating the application as the first step in a sequence, keeping the wording precise, keeping the period specified, keeping a copy of what was sent, and reading the reply against what was actually asked for. A register either has been supplied or it has not.

This article therefore stays close to the request itself. It explains who may ask under the Act and what the Act counts as information, because a request made by the wrong person, or aimed at material the Act does not reach, fails before its merits are considered. It then turns to the request in detail, to the words of Section 6, to the protection given to an applicant who is asked for reasons that the statute says need never be given, and to the drafting discipline that converts a grievance into a retrieval task an officer can perform. Throughout, the working test remains the one stated at the start. Before any sentence of an application is settled, the applicant can ask whether that sentence names a document that exists, in an office that can be identified, for a period that can be stated. If it does, the sentence belongs in the application. If it does not, it belongs somewhere else, in a complaint, in a representation, or in an appeal.

Who may ask, and what the Act counts as information

Section 3 of the Right to Information Act, 2005 gives the right to information to all citizens. The provision is short, and its brevity carries its meaning. The test laid down by the section is citizenship, and nothing else is written into the grant. Residence is not the test. Domicile is not the test. Presence within the territory on the day the application is made is not the test. A citizen who satisfies the single condition stated in the section holds the right in the terms in which Parliament conferred it, and an information officer examining an application has no warrant under Section 3 to add further conditions of the officer’s own devising. The simplicity of the grant matters in practice because applications are sometimes met at the counter, or in correspondence, with enquiries that belong to other bodies of law or to administrative habit rather than to this Act. The applicant may be asked where the applicant lives, or whether the applicant has some connection with the subject matter of the record. Section 3 makes none of those enquiries relevant. It makes citizenship relevant, and by its silence on every other qualification it leaves those other matters outside the doorway of the right.

Indian citizens living abroad use the same right. Their absence from the country does not diminish the citizenship on which the right rests, and the online portal for applications under the Act was opened to citizens including those living abroad, so that distance from the office holding the record does not by itself convert an entitled applicant into an outsider. The point deserves emphasis because the records that matter to a citizen living abroad are often precisely the records that are hardest to pursue in person: records concerning property, pensions, family documentation, and decisions taken by offices with which the applicant can no longer deal across a counter. A right that depended on physical presence would fail such an applicant at the moment it was most needed. A right that depends on citizenship travels with the citizen, and the machinery of electronic filing gives that principle a practical form rather than leaving it as an abstract proposition in the text of Section 3.

The citizenship test also fixes the boundary on the other side, and the boundary excludes bodies that many people instinctively treat as persons for everyday purposes. A company is a legal person for many purposes. A firm transacts business, holds accounts, and sues and is sued in its firm name. An association collects subscriptions, maintains premises, and speaks through its office bearers. None of that makes any of them a citizen. Citizenship, in the scheme of Section 3, attaches to natural persons, and a company, firm or association as such is not a citizen and cannot apply in its own name under the Act. The application that arrives in the name of a company alone, signed for and on behalf of the company and claiming the right in the company’s own capacity, therefore misstates the foundation on which the right rests. The defect is not a technicality invented by information officers to defeat inconvenient requests. It follows from the words of the granting provision itself, and an applicant who understands it in advance can avoid a refusal that has nothing to do with the sensitivity of the information sought and everything to do with the capacity in which it was sought.

Can a company file an RTI application in its own name?

No. Section 3 gives the right to information to citizens, and a company, firm or association is not a citizen for that purpose. In practice, a director, partner or office bearer applies in his or her own name as a citizen, and the information is supplied to that person in that capacity.

The established practice that has grown around this boundary resolves the difficulty without straining the statute. Where information is needed for the purposes of a company, firm or association, a director, a partner or an office bearer applies in his or her own name as a citizen, and receives the information in that capacity. The human applicant is the citizen whom Section 3 addresses. The information, once supplied to that citizen, can be used within the organisation for the purpose for which it was obtained, and nothing in the practice requires the applicant to pretend that the interest behind the request is purely personal. What the practice requires is honesty about capacity. The signature on the application is the signature of a citizen, and the right invoked is the citizen’s right. An office bearer who signs in that way loses nothing of substance, since the record supplied is the same record whichever name heads the request, and avoids an argument about standing that can consume the entire exchange while the underlying record stays unexamined.

From the person who may ask, attention turns to the thing that may be asked for, and here the Act is generous in a specific and deliberate way. Information, under Section 2(f), means material in any form. The definition then illustrates that breadth by naming records, documents, memos, emails, opinions, advices, press releases, circulars, orders, logbooks, contracts, reports, papers, samples, models, and data material held in electronic form. The list repays slow reading. It reaches the formal instruments of government, such as orders and circulars, and it also reaches the working material behind those instruments, such as memos, opinions and advices, which is where the reasoning of an office is usually found. It reaches material generated for publication, such as press releases, and material never intended for outside eyes, such as logbooks. It reaches the physical as well as the documentary, in samples and models. It reaches electronic holdings in express terms, so that information does not lose its character as information merely because an office holds it on a computer rather than in a paper file. For the applicant, the practical consequence is that the request need not hunt for a single perfect file. The definition follows the material in whatever form the office keeps it, and a request that describes the material accurately can be met from the form in which it actually exists.

The definition carries one further reach that applicants overlook and offices sometimes resist. Information includes information relating to a private body which can be accessed by a public authority under any other law. The record need not, therefore, have been created by the public authority itself, nor need it sit in the authority’s own registry, provided the authority can access it under another law. Where Parliament has given a public authority the power to call for, inspect, or obtain material from a private body under some other enactment, the citizen’s right under this Act can follow that same path to the material. The provision matters in fields where public functions are performed through private hands and where the paper trail of a decision may be divided between the authority that decided and the body that executed. An applicant in such a field should think not only about what the authority holds in its own files but also about what the authority is entitled to obtain.

The right itself is defined with equal care. The right to information, under Section 2(j), includes the right to inspection of works, documents and records, the right to take notes, extracts or certified copies of documents or records, the right to obtain certified copies, and the right to take certified samples of material. Each element of that definition does distinct work. Inspection allows the applicant to see the material in its own setting, which can matter where a file is voluminous, where the relevant noting is difficult to identify in advance, or where the thing to be understood is a work rather than a paper record at all. Notes and extracts allow the applicant to carry away the substance of what inspection reveals without demanding copies of an entire file. Certified copies carry the authority of the office’s own attestation, and certification matters when the copy must later be produced before another authority, a tribunal, or a court, and its authenticity might otherwise be questioned. Certified samples extend the same logic to material things. An applicant who reads Section 2(j) before drafting can choose among these modes deliberately, asking for the form of access that suits the purpose, instead of using the single word information and leaving the officer to decide how, and how completely, the request will be met.

Against this breadth stands a controlling limit, stated as established Supreme Court authority, and no applicant can draft well without holding it firmly in mind. In Central Board of Secondary Education v Aditya Bandopadhyay (2011), the Court held that the Act gives access to information that is available and existing. Where information sought is not part of the record of a public authority, and is not required to be maintained under any law or rule, the Act casts no obligation on the authority to collect or collate it in the way the applicant desires. The reasoning fixes the nature of the officer’s duty. An information officer is not required to create information. An information officer is not required to interpret information. An information officer is not required to solve the applicant’s problem, and an information officer is not required to answer hypothetical questions. Creation would turn the officer into an author, interpretation into an adviser, problem solving into a grievance authority, and hypothetical questions would detach the request from the record altogether. The judgment therefore does not narrow the Act out of hostility to transparency. It identifies what kind of instrument the Act is. It is an instrument of access to what exists, and its strength lies exactly there, in the applicant’s ability to demand production of material whose existence does not depend on the officer’s goodwill, opinion, or industry in composing a reply.

A second Supreme Court decision sharpens the same boundary from a different direction. In Khanapuram Gandaiah v Administrative Officer (2010), the Court held that an applicant may obtain copies of opinions, advices, circulars and orders, but cannot ask why such opinions or orders were passed, especially in matters of judicial decision. A judge speaks through the judgment. The remedy for a grievance with a judgment is appeal or revision, not an information request. The distinction drawn in that case is one that applicants cross constantly, often without noticing the crossing. To ask for the order is to ask for a record, and the Act supports the request. To ask why the order was passed is to ask for a justification beyond the record, a fresh statement of reasons composed in response to the question, and the Act does not support that request. In judicial matters the point has weight of its own, since the judgment is the complete and authoritative statement of the court’s reasoning, and an information request must not become a route for interrogating the judge who delivered it. Outside judicial matters the underlying lesson is the same even where the constitutional weight differs. The record states what was decided and, very often, records why it was decided at the time of decision, in notings and opinions that are themselves obtainable. What the applicant cannot demand is a second, retrospective explanation manufactured after the event, and recognising that limit early allows the applicant to aim every question at the contemporaneous material where genuine reasons, if they were recorded at all, will actually be found.

Two further boundaries can be marked briefly, since detailed treatment of them belongs elsewhere and this article stays on the filing route. Requests reaching into another person’s personal information meet the exemption written into Section 8(1)(j), whose wording and reach are traced in the story of the RTI Amendment Act 2019. Exemptions generally are gathered in Section 8 of the Act, and the full map of what is exempt and which bodies the Act covers belongs to the complete guide to the Right to Information Act 2005; this article stays on the filing route.

How to file an RTI application: the request itself

Section 6(1) of the Act sets out the act of requesting in terms that an applicant can follow without professional help. A person who desires to obtain information under the Act makes a request in writing or through electronic means, addressed to the Public Information Officer of the public authority concerned, or to the assistant information officer where the request is made through that channel, and the request is made in English or Hindi or in the official language of the area in which the application is made, accompanied by the prescribed fee. Every element of that sentence earns its place. Writing, or its electronic equivalent, fixes the request in a durable form that can be proved later, quoted later, and measured against the reply. The address to the Public Information Officer identifies the functionary whom the statute charges with dealing with requests, so that the application enters the office at the point where the Act’s duties attach rather than drifting among sections that owe the applicant no defined duty. The language provision protects the applicant from a demand that the request be recast in a language the applicant does not command. The prescribed fee formalises the transaction in a small and standard way, replacing negotiation or favour with a known condition that every applicant meets on the same terms.

Addressing deserves practical attention, because many sound applications lose time at this first step. The applicant’s concern is with a record, and the record is held by a public authority, so the first drafting task is to identify that authority correctly and to name its Public Information Officer as the addressee. Where the wrong authority is chosen, the request travels, or waits, or is returned, and the delay that follows is experienced by the applicant as obstruction even when its cause is simple misdirection at the point of sending. Care at the addressing stage is not pedantry. It is the first exercise of the same discipline that governs the body of the request, the discipline of naming things exactly: the right authority, the right officer, the right record, the right period.

The provision on language and the provision on electronic means lower the cost of access for applicants who would otherwise be excluded by distance or by tongue. A request through electronic means allows a citizen living far from the office, including a citizen living abroad, to set the statutory process in motion without travel and without dependence on an intermediary. A request in the official language of the area allows the applicant to describe a local record in the language in which that record was most likely created, which often improves precision, since file titles, register names and local designations translate imperfectly and a request that uses the office’s own vocabulary is easier for the officer to match to the material held. A reply claiming that the information is not held becomes harder to sustain when the request described the material in the terms the office itself uses.

Section 6(1) also carries, in its proviso, the sentence that matters most to an applicant who cannot write, and Section 6 as a whole must be read with that assistance in view. Where a request cannot be made in writing, the information officer shall render all reasonable assistance to the person making the request orally to reduce it to writing. The duty is placed on the officer, not on the requester. The requester who arrives without a written application is not turned away for want of a document that the requester cannot produce. The oral request is taken, assistance is rendered, and the request is reduced to writing so that it can enter the same process as any other application. An applicant or a helper accompanying such a requester should take care that the written reduction captures the request accurately, naming the same records and the same period that were described orally, since the written text is what the office will act upon.

Does an RTI applicant have to give a reason for the request?

No. Section 6(2) provides that an applicant shall not be required to give any reason for requesting the information. The same provision also protects other personal details, requiring only those details that are necessary for contacting the applicant, so motive, standing and purpose form no part of the officer’s examination of the request.

That protection, given by Section 6(2), is the provision a nervous applicant should hold closest. The applicant shall not be required to give any reason for requesting the information, or any personal details other than those necessary for contacting the applicant. No motive is examined. No locus is tested. The officer’s task begins with the information sought and with the question whether it is held and whether any provision of the Act stands against its disclosure. The officer’s task does not begin with the applicant’s character, intentions, politics, profession, or quarrels with the office. The reasons for the rule are not difficult to see once the alternative is imagined. If reasons could be demanded, reasons could be judged, and if reasons could be judged, the strength of an applicant’s justification would quietly become the measure of the right, so that the curious, the awkward and the hostile applicant would receive less than the obviously deserving applicant, although Section 3 gives the right to citizens without grading them by merit. A journalist tracing a contract, a pensioner pursuing a stopped payment, and a researcher studying the working of an office all stand in the same position under Section 6(2), and none must audition before the officer by explaining why the record is wanted.

The contact details exception within Section 6(2) is narrow and should be kept narrow in the applicant’s own mind. Details necessary for contacting the applicant may be required, because a reply must have somewhere to go and correspondence about the request must have a person to reach. That necessity justifies a name and an address for communication, and, where the applicant chooses electronic dealing, the particulars that make such dealing possible. It does not justify a general enquiry into the applicant’s life. An applicant who is pressed for particulars beyond contact should distinguish, calmly and in writing where possible, between the particulars that enable the office to reply and the particulars that merely satisfy curiosity or administrative habit. The distinction is the statute’s own, and invoking it is not discourtesy. It is an accurate statement of what Section 6(2) permits an officer to require and what it forbids an officer to demand as a condition of entertaining the request.

Drafting discipline follows from everything the Act has already said about records, and it can be described as a set of habits rather than as a form to be copied. The application should specify the information sought. It should identify the record, the office, and the period to which the request relates. It should keep to one subject per application where possible, so that the request travels to one file, one section and one set of registers rather than scattering across an entire department. It should ask for certified copies or for inspection expressly if either is wanted, since Section 2(j) gives those as distinct modes of access and an officer met with a general request may supply the least complete mode that satisfies its words. It should state the form in which the reply is wanted, so that the applicant receives material in a usable shape rather than in whatever shape happens to suit the office. None of these habits requires legal knowledge. All of them require the applicant to think, before writing, about the physical and administrative reality of the record: where it would be kept, by whom, under what description it would be filed, and across what span of time the relevant entries would run. That act of imagination is the closest thing the process has to a guarantee, because it aligns the words of the request with the filing system that must answer it.

Period deserves separate emphasis within that discipline, since its absence causes refusals and evasions that applicants often misread as bad faith. A request without a period asks the officer to search without boundaries, and an unbounded search can be declined, delayed, or answered for a convenient slice of time that the applicant never chose. A request with a period stated converts the search into a finite task and converts the reply into something that can be checked, because the applicant can compare the period asked for with the period actually covered by the material supplied and can identify any gap with precision. Naming the office that holds the record, as distinct from the department in the abstract, tells the officer where to look. Naming one subject keeps the request inside one trail of paper. Where an applicant genuinely needs material on two subjects, two applications, each clean in its own terms, will usually serve better than one application whose halves can be used to delay each other.

The worked example that best teaches this discipline is also the example with which this article opened, a citizen who wants to know why her widow pension stopped. Money on which a household depends has ceased to arrive, and no explanation has reached her. The natural draft, written from inside that experience, takes an interrogative form. Why was my pension stopped? Who is responsible for the delay? When will it be restarted? Each limb of that draft feels justified to the person writing it, and each limb invites refusal or failure for a reason the earlier discussion of Supreme Court authority has already supplied. The first question asks why an order was passed, and under the reasoning in Khanapuram Gandaiah v Administrative Officer the applicant may obtain the order and the material around it but cannot demand a fresh explanation of why it was made. It also asks the officer to create a statement that is not part of the record, contrary to the limit stated in Central Board of Secondary Education v Aditya Bandopadhyay, under which the Act reaches information that is available and existing. The second question, asking who is responsible for the delay, asks the officer to assign blame, which is an act of judgment and problem solving rather than an act of retrieval, and it can be met with a denial that any such information is held, a denial that is difficult to challenge because responsibility, stated as a conclusion, is indeed not a document in the file. The third question asks when payment will be restarted, which is a hypothetical and prospective question about a future administrative decision, and no register in the office contains its answer. A reply refusing or deflecting all three questions could therefore be written without the officer ever touching the file, and the pensioner would be left exactly where she began, holding correspondence instead of evidence.

The rewrite proceeds limb by limb, translating each concern into the record that embodies it. In place of asking why payment stopped, the application asks for a certified copy of the order or noting by which payment was stopped. In place of asking about the movement of money in the abstract, the application asks for a certified copy of the pension payment register for the relevant months, naming those months. In place of asking who is to blame, the application asks for a copy of the inspection or verification report relied on in stopping payment, if such a report was relied on, since a report of that kind is the document in which the factual basis of the decision, and the identity of the officer who recorded it, will appear as part of the record rather than as an accusation. In place of asking when payment will restart, the application asks for a copy of the sanction order under which the pension was granted and paid, because that order states the entitlement on which any argument for restoration must rest. The rewritten application contains no question that requires the officer to compose an answer, and that is its strength. Every sentence in it points at a document, and every document pointed at either exists in the office or does not, a matter the officer can confirm or deny without discretion about the applicant’s deservingness.

Consider what each rewritten request does mechanically, inside the office that receives it. The request for the payment register names a record with a known location and a known custodian, and the stated period tells the dealing hand exactly which entries to open, so the task becomes retrieval and copying rather than investigation. The request for the order or noting by which payment was stopped fixes the decision itself as the object of the search, and an office that made a decision of that consequence will have made it through some noting, endorsement, or order, so the request directs attention to the precise point in the file where authority for the stoppage must be found; if no such noting exists, the absence is itself information of great value, revealed by the request’s precision rather than hidden by its vagueness. The request for the inspection or verification report tests the factual foundation of the stoppage against the contemporaneous document, allowing the pensioner to see whether the report says what the office later claimed it said, whether it concerns the right person, and whether it predates the stoppage. The request for the sanction order reaches back to the origin of the entitlement, supplying the terms against which the stoppage must be measured. Together, the four requests convert an accusation into a retrieval task. The officer is no longer being charged with delay and invited to respond defensively. The officer is being handed a list of documents, each described with enough particularity to be found, and the ordinary machinery of the office, which is built for finding and copying its own records, can do the rest.

The pensioner who receives those documents holds something far more useful than an explanation composed for her benefit would have been. An explanation can be softened, summarised, and shaped to close the conversation. The register cannot. It shows the months in which payment was made and the month in which entries ceased, in the office’s own hand and figures. The noting shows who proposed the stoppage, on what ground, and who approved it, recorded at the time rather than reconstructed after a complaint. The verification report shows the factual claim on which the whole action rested, open to challenge if it is mistaken in its facts or if it concerns another person altogether. The sanction order shows the entitlement in its original terms. Armed with copies of that quality, and certified copies where certification was expressly requested, the pensioner can approach the authority that holds the power to restore payment, or any forum beyond it, with evidence rather than with grievance alone. That is the practical meaning of the claim with which this article began. The Act rewards the applicant who asks for records, because records carry their authority with them when they leave the office, while answers carry only the authority of the person who chose to give them.

The same translation can be performed on almost any grievance that brings a citizen to the Act. Behind every stalled file there is a register, a noting, or an order. Behind every rejection there is a document in which the rejection was recorded and material on which it was based. The applicant’s task is to name those documents as exactly as the available knowledge allows, to bind them to an office and a period, to choose inspection or certified copies deliberately, to give no reason because Section 6(2) asks for none, and to give no more of the applicant’s own particulars than contact requires. An application written in that spirit respects the limits the Supreme Court has stated, because it seeks only what is available and existing, and it respects the generosity of the definitions in Section 2, because it uses the full range of material and of access that those definitions provide. It also respects the applicant. It treats the application not as a plea to be weighed by an officer’s sympathy but as the exercise of a citizen’s right, framed in the only terms that make the right reliably enforceable, the terms of the record itself.

The fee: what filing costs and how the money must move

The fee that accompanies a request under the Right to Information Act is a small sum, and its smallness matters. A low fee keeps the procedure open to a citizen of ordinary means, while the existence of a fee at all gives the transaction a formal shape. The applicant who treats it as an afterthought misunderstands its place, because an error here can stop a well drafted request before any officer reads the question it contains.

The Act itself does not fix the amount. The fee is prescribed by rules, not by the Act itself, and the Centre and each state prescribe their own. Because the amount lives in subordinate legislation, it is set separately for different governments and for the public authorities under them. One figure learned for a central ministry cannot be assumed to travel unchanged to a state department.

For central public authorities the governing instrument is the Right to Information Rules, 2012, which replaced the earlier fee and cost rules of 2005. A figure or mode described under the arrangements that ran from 2005 to 2012 cannot be assumed to survive into the later rules. Within the central rules, Rule 3 deals with the fee for the application itself, Rule 4 with the fee for providing information, and Rule 5 with the person from whom no fee under either rule is charged.

Rule 3 fixes the application fee at Rs 10. Paying more does not strengthen a request, and paying less does not partly satisfy the rule. The sum is not the price of the information, whose charges are dealt with under Rule 4. It is the formal sum that marks the paper as an application under the Act, engaging duties that the statute enforces with time limits and appeals.

The same rule says an application shall ordinarily not contain more than five hundred words, excluding annexures, and adds that no application shall be rejected only on the ground that it contains more than five hundred words. Both halves must be held together. The first is a direction about the shape of a request, and the second is a protection against that direction becoming a ground of rejection by itself.

Treat the word limit as a drafting discipline, not a trap, because it rewards the short, specified request. Five hundred words, excluding annexures, is ample room to identify the record sought, the period it covers, and the office that made the decision, if the words are spent on specification rather than grievance or argument. The applicant who names the record in a few sentences has written the stronger application, since precision allows a record to be found, copied, or transferred without guesswork.

Rule 4 is the fee for providing information, distinct from the application fee under Rule 3. Its charges arise according to what the information turns out to be, how many pages it runs to, what form it takes, and how it is supplied. An applicant who understands its units can read a later demand for further fee without suspecting invention, and can shape the request with cost in mind by asking for extracts, particular pages, or inspection where inspection will serve.

For pages, Rule 4 charges Rs 2 for each page in A-3 or smaller size paper, so cost rises in proportion to the volume supplied. A copy in larger size paper is charged at the actual charge or cost price of a copy in larger size paper. The rule likewise charges the actual cost or price for samples or models, pricing each by its real cost rather than by the page rate.

Rule 4 also fixes Rs 50 per diskette or floppy. For a publication it charges the price fixed for the publication, or Rs 2 per page of photocopy for extracts from the publication. The contrast teaches why specification saves money, because the applicant who needs one chapter and asks for that extract pays by the page, while the applicant who asks vaguely for the publication pays its fixed price.

For inspection of records, no fee is charged for the first hour, and a fee of Rs 5 is charged for each subsequent hour or fraction of an hour. In the free first hour an applicant can identify the passages that are needed and then seek copies of those pages alone, instead of paying for a whole file copied on speculation. Rule 4 also includes so much of the postal charge involved in supplying the information as exceeds Rs 50, so only the excess over Rs 50 enters the fee.

Rule 5 provides that no fee under Rule 3 or Rule 4 is charged from a person who is below the poverty line, provided a copy of the certificate issued by the appropriate Government in that regard is submitted along with the application. The exemption therefore covers both the application fee and the charges for providing information. It is not claimed by assertion alone, because the proviso makes the certificate copy part of the mechanism by which the waiver operates.

The certificate copy is not a courtesy; it is the condition of the exemption, and an applicant who claims the exemption without enclosing it has not made a valid fee free application. A certificate described but not enclosed does not accompany the application in the sense the rule requires. The careful applicant places the copy with the request itself and mentions the enclosure in the covering text, so a missing sheet can be spotted before dispatch rather than after refusal.

At the Centre the fee may be paid in cash against proper receipt, or by demand draft, or by banker’s cheque, or by Indian Postal Order, in each case payable to the Accounts Officer of the public authority. Cash is tied to a receipt so that payment leaves proof, and the paper instruments are named so that no substitute is offered. The payee is an office, not a personally named officer and not a vaguely described department.

The commonest self inflicted wound arises with an Indian Postal Order left blank, or drawn in favour of the information officer by name, or drawn in favour of the wrong office. A blank order names no payee, an order in a personal name misdirects a payment meant for the accounts office, and an order in favour of the wrong office sends value to the wrong entity. In each case the authority cannot encash it and the file stalls before it begins. A brief check of the payee line before the envelope is sealed prevents the failure.

Cash is paid in person against a receipt, and the receipt should be kept with the copy of the application so that fee, request, and date can be proved together. Loose cash in an envelope is not a prescribed mode and buys the applicant no proof. It cannot be distinguished after the event from an application sent without any fee, and it invites dispute about whether money was enclosed and how much.

Official guidance treats an application unaccompanied by the prescribed fee, or by proof of below poverty line status where the exemption is claimed, as not a valid application under the Act. Either the fee accompanies the request in a prescribed mode payable to the proper payee, or the exemption is claimed with the proof Rule 5 requires. An application that does neither is paper in an office, but it does not stand as an application under the Act.

It follows that the thirty day clock does not run on a request the statute does not recognise as made. An applicant who counts thirty days from posting a fee defective application has built a later appeal on a period that never began. The discipline is therefore complete before dispatch: check the fee, the mode, and the payee, and enclose the certificate copy where the exemption is claimed, because that check starts the statutory period running.

No fee is charged for a first appeal to central authorities, so a wrong or incomplete central reply can be carried to the first appellate authority without a further fee. The states differ here as elsewhere, and Maharashtra’s rules, for example, prescribe a fee of Rs 20 for an appeal, charged by court fee stamp. Neither position can be deduced from the other, and the central relief must not be carried across to a state filing by assumption.

State variation must be stated as variation. Every state has made its own fee rules under the Act, and most prescribe the same Rs 10 application fee, but not all, because Gujarat prescribes Rs 20. Several states take the fee by court fee stamp or treasury challan where the Centre takes a postal order, so the correct amount in the wrong instrument is still a defective payment for that authority.

The durable instruction is therefore short. Before filing with a state authority, read that state’s fee rules for the amount and the mode, because the central figures in this article govern central authorities only. Because the sums are small, exactness costs the applicant almost nothing, and because the procedure is exact, inexactness can cost a valid application. Get the amount, mode, and payee right, with the certificate copy where proof replaces payment, and the request begins as one the Act will enforce.

Read as a whole, Rules 3 to 5 form a single small system rather than three disconnected charges. Rule 3 opens the file for Rs 10, Rule 4 prices the supply according to page, format, sample, publication, inspection time, and postal excess, and Rule 5 lifts both charges from the applicant below the poverty line who submits the required certificate copy. An applicant who can say which rule a demand arises under can also say whether the amount demanded matches the amount that rule prescribes. That is the difference between paying a fee and merely surrendering whatever sum an office happens to mention.

The system also rewards an applicant who plans the request before filing it. A narrow request for named pages costs Rs 2 for each such page, an inspection begins with a free hour in which the needed pages can be identified, and an extract from a publication costs the photocopy rate rather than the fixed price of the whole work. None of these savings requires argument or concession from the authority. They follow from the schedule itself, claimed by the shape of the request that the applicant chose at the outset.

Proof runs through the fee provisions as steadily as money does. Cash is proved by a proper receipt, a demand draft or banker’s cheque or Indian Postal Order is proved by the instrument payable to the Accounts Officer, and fee free status is proved by the certificate copy submitted along with the application. In each case the rule gives the applicant a document to keep and the office a document to act on. Where proof is missing, the dispute that follows is rarely about the underlying right to information and almost always about whether the prescribed step was taken at all.

For that reason the fee should be settled before the wording of the request is polished to its final form, and checked again after that wording is settled. The amount may change in character if the applicant decides to seek inspection instead of copies, or extracts instead of a whole publication, even though the Rs 10 application fee itself remains constant for a central authority. A final reading of the applicable rules, central or state as the case may be, against the envelope and its contents is the last act of drafting. It takes minutes, it requires no assistance, and it protects every other act that went before it. The state examples given in the rules themselves show why this final reading cannot be borrowed from another jurisdiction. An appeal that is free before a central authority carries Rs 20 by court fee stamp in Maharashtra, and an application that costs Rs 10 before most authorities carries Rs 20 in Gujarat, while the mode shifts between postal order, court fee stamp, and treasury challan according to the rule book in force. None of these differences is large in money, and each is decisive in form. The applicant who reads the governing rules first meets the difference on paper, at leisure, rather than in a returned application after the fee has already been sent in the wrong shape.

Sending the request to the right public authority

A request is addressed not to the government in the abstract, and not to whichever office is nearest or most familiar, but to a particular officer in the authority that holds the record. The request goes to the Public Information Officer of the public authority that holds the record. A well framed question sent to an authority that never made the decision and never kept the file will produce either a transfer, with its delay, or a reply stating accurately that the information is not held there.

Public authorities publish the names and addresses of their information officers, and that published information is the starting point of the application. The applicant’s first task is identification, not drafting, because the department that decided is the natural home of the record of the decision and the office that holds the file is the natural recipient of the request for it. Time spent establishing which office decided and which office holds is not delay. It is the work that drafting presupposes, and a request written before it is done is a draft in search of an address.

The clues are usually in the papers already in the applicant’s hands. A letter carries the name of the office that sent it, an order or sanction identifies the authority that issued it, and a scheme is administered by the department named on its own forms and receipts. Each clue narrows the field from a department to an office and from an office to its published Public Information Officer. Where reasons rest with a deciding office and implementation rests with another, the applicant who needs both records must recognise that two officers may be involved.

Section 5(2) provides for Assistant Public Information Officers at sub divisional or sub district level, who receive applications and appeals and forward them to the information officer, the first appellate authority, or the Commission as the case may be. The assistant officer is a receiving and forwarding point, not the officer who decides disclosure. Substantive handling still belongs to the Public Information Officer of the authority that holds the record, to whom the assistant officer forwards what was received.

Many sub divisional post offices receive applications for central public authorities in this capacity, which is the route open to an applicant far from the authority’s office. For such an applicant the provision converts an impractical journey into a local act of lodgement. The application must still be prepared exactly as for direct delivery, with the prescribed fee in the prescribed mode payable to the proper payee, because the assistant route changes the place of receipt and not the requirements of validity.

The assistant route carries a cost in time. Where an application is given to an Assistant Public Information Officer, an additional five days is added in computing the period for response under the proviso to Section 7(1). Convenience is bought with five days, and the applicant who uses the route should count the response period with those five days included. A later appeal, if one is needed, should be filed on that correct computation rather than on the shorter period that would have applied to direct delivery.

Section 6(3) provides for the request that still lands at the wrong authority. Where an application is made to a public authority for information which is held by another public authority, or whose subject matter is more closely connected with the functions of another public authority, the authority to which the application is made shall transfer the application, or such part of it as may be appropriate, to that other authority and shall inform the applicant immediately about the transfer. The transfer must be made as soon as practicable and in no case more than five days from the date of receipt.

Each element of that provision protects a distinct interest. The trigger is that another authority holds the information or is more closely connected with its subject matter, the act required is transfer by the receiving authority rather than fresh filing by the applicant, and the outer time limit is five days from receipt. The duty to inform the applicant immediately means the person affected learns where the request has gone from the authority that sent it there, without discovering the move by enquiry long afterwards.

What happens if an RTI application is sent to the wrong public authority?

If a request reaches the wrong public authority, Section 6(3) requires that authority to transfer the application, or the appropriate part of it, to the authority that holds the information, within five days of receipt, and also to inform the applicant immediately about the transfer.

Partial transfer is the pattern that arises where a request straddles two authorities, because Section 6(3) speaks of transferring such part of the application as may be appropriate. The receiving authority can answer for the part whose record it holds and transfer the part whose record lies elsewhere, informing the applicant so that each part can be followed along its own path. A request that keeps its distinct items visibly distinct assists that process, since separate and identifiable items are the easiest items to route.

The applicant’s protection is that the receiving authority cannot simply sit on a misdirected file or return it as not theirs. Sitting on the file defeats the five day limit and the duty to inform the applicant immediately. Returning the file defeats the duty to transfer, which is a duty to send the application onward to the authority that holds the information, not a liberty to hand the problem back to the citizen who raised it.

An applicant who receives no reply and no transfer intimation should frame any complaint in the language of the provision itself. The application was made to that authority on a stated date, the information was held by another authority or its subject matter was more closely connected with that authority, and the duty was to transfer within five days and to inform the applicant immediately. A complaint stated in those terms identifies the exact default, and exactness about default is what an appellate authority can act upon.

Against that protection stands a failure mode the transfer provision cannot cure. A request addressed so vaguely, to the Government of India and to nothing more specific, that no officer can tell whose record it seeks gives the receiving officer nothing from which a destination can be identified. A transfer requires a destination, judged by the closer connection between the subject matter and the functions of an identifiable authority. That is a drafting failure, not a transfer case, and its remedy lies in the identification work that should precede drafting.

Naming the deciding office in the application is therefore the cheapest insurance in the whole procedure, because it costs a line of text. It tells the receiving officer where the applicant believes the record rests, and it gives an officer who disagrees a concrete starting point from which the correct destination can be identified for a transfer. A request carrying that anchor is no longer a circular addressed to the state in general, but a request tied to a transaction between the citizen and a particular office.

The particulars that support that anchor belong on the face of the application itself. A reference, an order, a file, a scheme, or a decision that the applicant can identify in the opening lines helps the receiving officer either to answer or to transfer, and it helps the applicant to trace the request at every later stage. Particulars buried where a forwarding hand might separate them from the request itself do less work. The application that carries its routing information openly is the least likely to be stranded.

Read together, the routing provisions place a fair share of responsibility on each side of the counter. The citizen’s share is identification before drafting, a request addressed to the Public Information Officer of the authority that holds the record, the use of published names and addresses, and a correct counting of the extra five days where the assistant route has been used. The official share is forwarding by the Assistant Public Information Officer, transfer within five days with immediate intimation where the request belongs elsewhere, and an answer from the authority that holds the record.

The two routes to the right authority, direct delivery to its Public Information Officer and lodgement through an Assistant Public Information Officer, are not rivals but answers to distance. The applicant near the authority’s office gains nothing from the assistant channel except an extra five days in the computation of the response period. The applicant far away gains a lawful local lodgement that would otherwise be impractical. Choosing between them is therefore a question of geography and record keeping, settled by keeping proof of the date and place of lodgement in either case.

A request that has been routed with care also travels better when something goes wrong later. The published name and address of the officer, the deciding office named on its face, the date of lodgement, and any intimation of transfer together form a chain that an appellate authority can follow without reconstruction. Where that chain is missing, the appeal must first rebuild the history of the request before it can reach the merits of the refusal or silence that followed. Routing, like the fee, is a small preliminary discipline whose absence is felt at every later stage and whose presence is rarely noticed, precisely because nothing has gone astray.

The reply clock: thirty days and the rules that change it

The Right to Information Act, 2005 does not leave the timing of a reply to courtesy, to office habit, or to the convenience of the file. It fixes a clock in Section 7, gives that clock a starting point in the receipt of the request, attaches consequences to the expiry of the period, and modifies the ordinary computation for a small number of defined situations. An applicant who understands the ordinary rule and the modifications that may alter it can read a reply, or read a silence, with precision. An applicant who treats thirty days as a loose expectation loses that precision, because the Act treats the period as a legal limit and not as an administrative target. The questions that matter are therefore disciplined questions. When was the request received? Which version of the clock applies to information of this character, given through this route, and concerning a matter of this kind? Has any event occurred that the statute says is to be excluded from the computation, and what follows when the period expires without a decision?

The ordinary rule is stated in Section 7(1). The information officer shall, as expeditiously as possible and in any case within thirty days of the receipt of the request, either provide the information on payment of the prescribed fee or reject the request for reasons specified in Section 8 or Section 9. The sentence carries three distinct obligations. The first is a duty of expedition, expressed in the words as expeditiously as possible, which deny the officer any understanding that the thirtieth day is the natural day for a reply in every case. The second is an outer limit, expressed in the words in any case within thirty days, which converts expedition into a measurable duty and fixes the point beyond which delay becomes default. The third is a duty to decide one way or the other within that limit, either by providing the information on payment of the prescribed fee or by rejecting the request, and a rejection is not at large, because it must rest on reasons specified in Section 8 or Section 9.

That structure matters because a reply that drifts is not a third statutory outcome alongside supply and rejection. The Act contemplates a decision. Supply answers the request by giving the information sought. Rejection answers the request by refusing it for a reason that the Act itself specifies. Anything that is neither supply nor a reasoned rejection within the period leaves the officer short of what Section 7(1) required, and the later provisions of Section 7 address exactly that shortfall. The clock measures the time allowed for the decision, not the time allowed for correspondence about the decision, and that distinction runs through every modification that follows.

The thirty days run from receipt of the request by the authority. That starting point sounds simple, and in a straightforward filing it is simple, yet the whole computation depends on it, because a period counted from receipt can be proved or disputed only by reference to the date on which the request reached the authority. Proof of the date of receipt therefore matters in a way that goes beyond ordinary prudence. If receipt is placed a week later than the applicant believes, the reply date moves with it, the date for an appeal moves with it, and an argument about delay becomes an argument about arithmetic before it becomes an argument about default. The statute counts from an event, the arrival of the request, rather than from the applicant preparing it or deciding to send it. The keeping of the records that prove that date belongs to another part of the guidance on filing and is not developed here, but the legal reason for keeping them belongs to this discussion, because without a fixed starting date the thirty days cannot be counted by either side.

Within the ordinary rule sits an exception of unusual severity, placed in a proviso to Section 7(1). Where the information sought concerns the life or liberty of a person, the information shall be provided within forty-eight hours of the receipt of the request. The period is not shortened by a proportion or softened by a direction to act quickly. It is replaced. Two days stand where thirty days stood, and the command remains a command to provide the information, expressed in the same mandatory language as the main provision. The severity is written into the trigger itself, because information that concerns the life or liberty of a person belongs to a class in which delay of the ordinary kind can defeat the very purpose of the request, and the Act answers that character of information with a period measured in hours rather than in weeks.

The discipline of the proviso lies in what triggers it. It is the character of the information, not the urgency the applicant feels, that brings the forty-eight hours into operation. A request does not become a life or liberty request because the applicant is anxious, because the matter feels pressing, or because the applicant would strongly prefer a quicker answer. The information itself must concern the life or liberty of a person. That distinction prevents the exception from dissolving into a general fast track available on assertion alone, which would make the ordinary thirty days meaningless for any applicant willing to use urgent language, and it gives the genuine case its proper force, because where the information does concern life or liberty the applicant is not asking for administrative kindness. The applicant should therefore say, in terms, that the information concerns life or liberty, and should say why, so that the application carries that statement and that reasoning on its face and the officer receiving it is confronted with the statutory trigger in the applicant’s own words.

A second proviso works in the opposite direction and adds time rather than subtracting it. Where the application was given to an Assistant Public Information Officer, five additional days are added in computing the response period. The addition is modest and mechanical. It does not create a new period, it does not change the nature of the decision required, and it does not alter any other rule in Section 7. It recognises the route by which the application travelled, since an application given to the assistant officer reaches the information officer through additional hands, and the statute allows five days for that feature of the filing. For the applicant, the consequence is a matter of honest counting. A reply that arrives on the thirty third day after an application given to an assistant officer is not late in the same way as one that arrives on the thirty third day after an application given directly, because the computation itself differs. Equally, the addition is fixed at five days and no more, and it is not a general allowance for internal movement or for delay after the application reaches the officer who must decide it.

The third modification concerns money, and it is found in Section 7(3). Where a decision is taken to provide the information on payment of a further fee, the officer sends an intimation to the applicant stating the calculation of the further fee required. The applicant is told, in other words, what further amount is demanded and how that amount has been calculated, and the decision to supply is tied to payment of that fee. Section 7(3) then provides that the period intervening between the despatch of that intimation and the payment of the fee shall be excluded in computing the period of thirty days. The image that best captures the rule is a pause. The clock stops while the intimation is with the applicant and the fee remains unpaid, and it resumes when the fee is paid. The clock pauses; it does not restart.

That pause has to be understood exactly, because both sides can misread it if it is left vague. It is not a fresh thirty days granted to the authority after payment, and an officer who has used twenty days before sending the intimation has ten days of the original period left after the pause ends, not thirty. Neither is the intervening period a period of default by the authority, because the statute itself directs that it be excluded, so a reply given after payment but within the remaining counted days is within time even though more than thirty calendar days have passed since receipt. The trigger for the pause is equally specific. There must have been a decision to provide the information on payment of a further fee, and an intimation stating the calculation must have been despatched. An informal suggestion that a fee might be payable does not carry the same statutory character as the intimation the section contemplates. The applicant reading a late reply should therefore reconstruct the count in stages, separating the days before despatch, the excluded interval, and the days after payment, rather than measuring the whole episode as one unbroken stretch of calendar time.

Where a third party is brought into the decision, the clock lengthens again, and the governing period is forty days. Where Section 11 is engaged, the decision on the request is to be made within forty days of receipt of the request. The procedure that Section 11 prescribes is analysed in the material on third party questions elsewhere in this guidance, and the concern here is confined to the clock, but the clock cannot be stated without the dates that structure it. Notice is given to the third party within five days of receipt of the request. The third party’s representation is made within ten days of receiving that notice. The decision then follows within the forty days allowed from receipt of the original request. Those dates explain why the ordinary thirty days would not hold in such a case, because time is consumed by a notice that the Act requires and by a representation that the Act invites. For the applicant, a decision arriving after thirty days is not automatically a default where Section 11 has been engaged, yet the extension is not open ended, because forty days remains a limit running from receipt of the request.

A different and more complete displacement of the ordinary clock occurs under Section 24, which deals with organisations placed in the Second Schedule to the Act. For information about allegations of human rights violations held by such an organisation, the Act displaces Section 7 altogether. The information is provided only after the approval of the Central Information Commission, and it is provided within forty five days from the date of receipt of the request. Both halves of that rule matter. The approval condition interposes the Commission between the request and the supply, so the applicant is not dealing with a simple extension of time in the hands of the organisation, and the forty five day period gives that process its own outer limit, distinct from the thirty days of Section 7(1) and from the forty days of the third party procedure. The same provision draws a boundary that applicants should note with care, because allegations of corruption stand outside the Section 24 exclusion without that approval condition, and the applicant should keep the two categories separate rather than allowing the scheduled status of the organisation to swallow every request made to it.

All of these periods would be weaker than they appear if expiry produced no consequence, and Section 7 therefore attaches two consequences to a failure to decide in time, one concerned with the status of the request and one concerned with its cost. The first is Section 7(2). If the information officer fails to give a decision on the request within the period specified, the officer shall be deemed to have refused the request. The deeming is the heart of the provision. Silence is converted by the statute into an appealable refusal, so nothing further needs to happen for that conversion to occur. The period expires, no decision has been given, and the request stands refused by operation of the provision itself. The applicant need not wait beyond the period, need not plead with the officer for a decision, and need not send a reminder as a condition of treating the request as refused, because Section 7(2) has already done that work.

The second consequence concerns the fee, and it follows the first with a logic that applicants should grasp firmly. An authority that has failed to comply with the time limits has lost the basis on which it might otherwise have demanded a further fee for the information when the information is eventually supplied. Delay of that kind is the authority’s default, not the applicant’s, and the Act does not permit the cost of the information to survive a default that the authority itself committed. The provision that carries this consequence is Section 7(6), and it answers a question that arises in a recognisable situation, where a reply eventually arrives after the period has expired and a demand for a further fee arrives with it, or where an applicant who has treated the silence as a deemed refusal is later offered the information on payment.

Is information supplied free of charge if the reply comes late?

Yes, where the public authority fails to comply with the time limit specified for the reply, Section 7(6) requires the information to be provided free of charge, so the further fee that might otherwise have been demanded is not payable for that information at all.

The continuation of that rule is brief, because the rule itself is brief. Section 7(6) provides that where the authority fails to comply with the time limits specified, the information shall be provided free of charge. The further fee dies with the deadline. An applicant who is asked to pay after such a failure is entitled to point to the expired period and to the provision, and to treat the demand as one that the Act no longer sustains. The condition is the authority’s breach of the time limit, and the applicant’s count of the days, allowing for any assistant officer addition, any fee pause that Section 7(3) genuinely produced, any third party period, or any special period that applied, is what establishes whether that condition is met.

The dates scattered through the provisions above become usable when they are gathered into a single working artifact, and that artifact is the RTI four-date calendar. It is not a form prescribed by the Act and it carries no official status. It is a discipline for the applicant’s own file, built from the four dates on which the proceeding turns, namely the filing date, the reply date, the first appeal date and the second appeal date. Kept together on one calendar, those dates prevent the commonest error in a request that goes wrong, which is to remember that a reply is late without having fixed the day on which lateness began and the day by which the next step must be taken.

The date that matters	How the date is calculated	If the date passes without action	What to do on that day
The filing date	The date the application reaches the information officer, or the assistant officer, and everything is counted from receipt	If nothing is kept, the applicant cannot prove the count later	Keep the copy of the application and the proof of despatch or acknowledgement
The reply date	Thirty days from receipt, forty-eight hours for life or liberty, five days more through an assistant officer, forty days where a third party is consulted	Expiry without a decision is a deemed refusal under Section 7(2)	Treat the file as refused and move to the first appeal without waiting further
The first appeal date	Within thirty days from the expiry of the reply period or from receipt of the decision, whichever starts the count for the applicant	The appellate authority may admit a late appeal where the applicant was prevented by sufficient cause	File the appeal with the grounds, the application copy and the proof of filing
The second appeal date	Within ninety days from the date on which the first appeal decision should have been made or was actually received	The Commission may admit a late appeal on sufficient cause	File the second appeal to the Central or State Information Commission with the full paper trail

Reading the reply: supply, refusal, and the forms information takes

A reply under the Act is a decision before it is a letter, and it repays being read as a decision. It may supply the information, it may refuse the request, it may do both in relation to different parts of what was asked, and it may deal with the request in a form different from the form in which the information was sought. Each of those outcomes carries its own statutory requirements, and an applicant who reads the whole envelope as a single undifferentiated answer misses the points at which the Act has given the applicant something to test. The discipline is to read slowly and in parts. What has been supplied, and in what form? What has been refused, and on what stated ground? What notice was the applicant entitled to receive about the decision, and was that notice given in full? A reply that is generous on one page and defective on another is not to be judged by its general tone. It is to be judged part by part against the provisions that govern each part.

Refusal is the outcome that the Act regulates most closely, because refusal is the outcome that defeats the request, and the regulation begins with a simple proposition. A refusal is not a shrug. Section 7(8) provides that where a request has been rejected, the information officer shall communicate to the requester the reasons for the rejection, the period within which an appeal may be preferred against the rejection, and the particulars of the appellate authority against whom the appeal lies. Three things must therefore travel with every rejection, and they travel as duties owed by the officer, not as courtesies that a well run office adds when time permits. The applicant is entitled to receive all three without asking for them, without inferring them from other correspondence, and without reconstructing them from the Act unaided.

What must a letter refusing an RTI request contain?

A refusal letter must communicate the reasons for the rejection, the period within which an appeal may be preferred against that rejection, and the particulars of the appellate authority to whom the appeal lies, because Section 7(8) requires the information officer to communicate all three to the requester.

Each of the three contents does different work, and the absence of any one of them leaves a different gap in the applicant’s position. The reasons for the rejection tell the applicant what case must be met on appeal, because an appeal against a refusal is an argument with the ground of refusal, and an applicant who has not been told the ground cannot frame that argument except by guessing at what the officer had in mind. The period within which an appeal may be preferred tells the applicant how long that argument may be prepared before the right to make it is put at risk, and it fixes that period by communication from the officer rather than leaving the applicant to work it out under pressure. The particulars of the appellate authority tell the applicant where the appeal goes and before whom it will be heard, which is the practical beginning of the next stage of the proceeding. A rejection missing any of the three is defective on its face, and the defect is itself material for the appeal. That point deserves emphasis, because applicants often treat a defective refusal as a merely untidy one and proceed as though the only question were whether the ground of refusal was sound. The sounder approach is to plead both. The ground may be wrong, and separately, the letter may have failed to do what Section 7(8) required it to do, and the second failure is visible on the face of the document without any inquiry into the record behind it.

Severability carries the same insistence on decision in parts into the substance of the record itself, and it is provided for in Section 10. Where a request is rejected on the ground that it concerns information which is exempt from disclosure, access may nevertheless be provided to that part of the record which does not contain any information exempt from disclosure and which can reasonably be severed from any part that contains exempt information. The provision rejects the all or nothing instinct. A record is not a single indivisible object that stands or falls by its most sensitive page, and an exemption that attaches to part of a record does not, by that attachment alone, spread across the whole of it. The officer is required to consider the record in parts, to identify the part that is exempt, to ask whether the remainder can reasonably be severed from it, and, where severance is reasonable, to provide access to the remainder. An all or nothing refusal of a mixed record is not what the section permits, and an applicant faced with such a refusal is entitled to ask, on appeal, the severability question in terms, namely what part of the record contained no exempt information and could reasonably have been severed and supplied.

Section 10 does not leave the applicant to infer that this exercise was carried out, because Section 10(2) requires notice where access is provided to a severed part. The applicant is to be given notice of the decision, together with the reasons for it, the findings on any material question of fact, the name and designation of the person giving the decision, the fee calculated, and the applicant’s rights with respect to review of the decision. Read as a whole, the notice converts a partial supply from an unexplained bundle of pages into an accountable decision. The applicant can see what was withheld and why, can see who decided it, can check the fee demanded against the calculation disclosed, and can identify the route by which the withholding may be challenged. A severed supply unaccompanied by that notice leaves the applicant holding pages without the reasoning that gives the pages their legal meaning, and that omission is a proper subject for the same appeal that challenges the withholding itself.

The form in which information arrives is governed by Section 7(9). Information shall ordinarily be provided in the form in which it is sought unless it would disproportionately divert the resources of the public authority or would be detrimental to the safety or preservation of the record in question. The opening words give the applicant the starting position, which is that the form sought is the form to be supplied, and the qualification that follows is framed as an exception to that position rather than as a general discretion to supply information in whatever form the authority finds convenient. The two grounds in the qualification are specific. One concerns the resources of the authority and requires that the diversion be disproportionate, not merely real or inconvenient. The other concerns the record itself, and requires a detriment to its safety or preservation. At the same time, the proviso is the authority’s shield and the applicant’s warning. A demand framed to require an office to shut down and compile material in a form that bears no proportion to the work involved is a demand that the section itself answers, because the qualification was written for exactly that excess. The applicant who frames a request in a form that follows the record as the authority holds it stands on the ordinary rule, while the applicant who demands an elaborate reconstruction hands the authority the very ground on which the form may lawfully be refused.

Real replies often combine these outcomes, and the final discipline in reading a reply is to keep them separate. A reply may supply part of what was asked, claim exemption for part, and transfer part of the request elsewhere, and none of those elements cancels either of the others. Each part carries its own reasoning and its own appeal rights. The supplied part is to be checked against what was sought and against the form in which it was sought. The exempted part is to be tested against the ground stated for it, against the severability question that Section 10 poses, and against the notice that ought to have accompanied the decision. The transferred part is to be followed on its own terms rather than treated as answered by the supply of the remainder. The applicant should therefore read a long reply as several decisions bound in one envelope, marking each decision, the provision under which it purports to have been made, and the step that remains open in respect of it. That habit, more than any single provision, is what turns a reply from an ending into a stage in a proceeding that the Act has structured to continue.

The day the reply does not come: deemed refusal and the first appeal

The most common end of an RTI application is not refusal but silence. A refusal at least arrives in a form that can be read, answered, and challenged. It names a provision, it gives a reason, however thin that reason may be, and it tells the applicant what the public authority says its position is. Silence does none of that work. The days pass, the period fixed by the Act runs out, and the applicant is left holding a copy of an application and a proof of filing, with nothing from the other side to set against them. It can feel like a position without a remedy, because there appears to be nothing to appeal against. The Act has already answered that feeling. Section 7(2) deems the request refused when the period expires without a decision. The legal consequence does not depend on the officer sending a letter that says the request is refused. The expiry itself does the work. Once the time has run out and no decision has been given, the request stands refused in the eyes of the statute, and the applicant may proceed on that footing.

That provision changes the character of the waiting period. The applicant is not waiting indefinitely in the hope that a reply will eventually arrive, and the authority is not free to treat a delayed file as a file that remains comfortably undecided. The deemed refusal is not a courtesy construction or an argument that the applicant has to persuade someone to accept. It is the Act speaking directly to the situation. For that reason the applicant’s correct move after the expiry is not a reminder letter but the first appeal. A reminder does not start any clock that the Act recognises, does not create any duty with a time limit attached to it, and does not place the file before an officer with the power to decide an appeal. It leaves the file exactly where the silence left it, in the hands that produced the silence. The first appeal, by contrast, is the step the statute has built for precisely this situation, and it moves the matter upward within the authority to an officer who is required to deal with it as an appeal.

Section 19(1) supplies the route, and its language repays close reading because the route is wider than many applicants assume. A person who does not receive a decision within the time specified, or who is aggrieved by a decision of the information officer, may within thirty days from the expiry of that period or from the receipt of the decision prefer an appeal to such officer as is senior in rank to the Public Information Officer in the same public authority. The first limb covers the case of silence. The second limb covers the case of a decision that disappoints, whether that decision is an outright refusal, a partial supply, or a supply in a form that the applicant says does not answer the request as it was made. The two limbs meet in one procedure, and the applicant does not have to choose a different door for silence than for refusal. The deemed refusal and the spoken refusal both lead to the first appeal, and both are dealt with under the same provision.

Two features of that arrangement deserve weight, and the first concerns the forum itself. The appellate officer is inside the same authority. The appeal does not leave the organisation whose officer failed to reply or whose officer gave the decision under challenge. It goes to an officer senior in rank to the Public Information Officer, but seniority is exercised within the same public authority, with its shared files and its shared habits of work. That is the design’s acknowledged weakness, and it is treated in the limits material elsewhere in this article, so the point is recorded here without being developed beyond what the structure itself shows. An applicant who understands the structure will not mistake the first appeal for a hearing before an outside body, and will prepare the appeal in a manner that also keeps the record fit for the stage that follows if the first appeal does not produce the information. The file built at this stage is the file that travels further, and its completeness matters from the beginning.

The second feature concerns the clock, and it matters in every case because an appeal filed out of time creates a difficulty that a well prepared appeal should never have to face. The clock runs from whichever event the applicant’s case presents, expiry or receipt. Where there has been silence, the thirty days run from the expiry of the period within which a decision should have been given. Where there has been a decision, the thirty days run from the receipt of the decision. An applicant in the silence case cannot wait for a receipt that will never come, and an applicant in the decision case is not to be measured from an expiry that passed before the decision was in hand. The applicant should therefore state, in the appeal itself, which event has started the clock and on what date that event occurred. In the silence case that means stating the date on which the period expired. In the decision case that means stating the date on which the decision was received. A clear statement of that kind removes argument about timeliness before argument about substance begins.

The thirty day period is firm, but it is not without a door for the applicant who has been prevented from using it. The proviso to Section 19(1) permits the appellate officer to admit an appeal after the thirty days if satisfied that the appellant was prevented by sufficient cause from filing in time. The word to hold on to is satisfied. The appellate officer has to be satisfied, and satisfaction is not produced by assertion alone. Sufficient cause must be pleaded and shown, not assumed. The cause relied on should be set out in the appeal, in order, with the dates that belong to it, so that the officer can see what prevented the filing and for how long the prevention operated. The provision is a safeguard against hardship, not a general extension of the period, and the applicant who can file within thirty days should do so and keep the proviso in reserve for the case that needs it.

A separate and shorter point belongs here because it arises under the same section and is easily confused with the applicant’s own right. Section 19(2) gives a third party a parallel right of appeal. A third party aggrieved by an order to disclose may appeal within thirty days from the date of the order. The third party procedure is handled elsewhere in this article, and only the existence of the parallel right needs to be noted here, so that the applicant reading the section is not caught unprepared by the appearance of another appellant in a matter that began as a single request for information.

What the first appeal should carry follows from what the appellate officer needs in order to decide it. The officer needs to know who is appealing, what was asked for, when it was asked for, what happened or failed to happen in response, why the outcome is said to be wrong, and what outcome is sought instead. The appeal should therefore carry the particulars of the applicant and of the original application, so that the file before the appellate officer is identified without guesswork and can be matched to the authority’s own record of the request. It should carry a copy of the application and of the proof of its filing, because in a silence case those two documents together establish the foundation of the whole appeal. The application shows what information was sought and in what terms. The proof of filing shows that the application reached the authority and fixes the date from which the period for decision ran. Without the first, the appellate officer cannot judge the request. Without the second, the claim of expiry rests on nothing firmer than the applicant’s word.

The appeal should also carry a copy of the reply or a statement that no reply was received by the date it fell due. The alternative is deliberate, because the two kinds of case present differently and the appeal should say plainly which kind it is. Where a reply was received, the reply itself is the decision under challenge, and the appellate officer should have its exact terms rather than a summary filtered through the applicant’s disappointment. Grounds that answer a provision cited in the reply have force only if the reply is there to be answered. Where no reply was received, the statement that none was received by the date it fell due is the equivalent document. It invokes the deemed refusal, it identifies the expiry from which the thirty days have run, and it explains why the appeal contains no reply to enclose. Such a statement should be unambiguous. It should not hedge between saying that a reply was late and saying that no reply came, because the two positions start the clock differently and invite different answers from the authority.

Upon that foundation the appeal should set out the grounds taken shortly and in order, and the relief sought, which is supply of the information. Shortness in the grounds is a strength and not a concession. A ground stated shortly can be followed, tested, and answered, while a ground buried in a long narrative of grievance gives the appellate officer no clean question to decide. Order matters for the same reason, since grounds taken in order follow the application through its life, from filing, to expiry or decision, to the reason the outcome is challenged. The relief should be stated with equal clarity. The relief sought is supply of the information that was requested. Stating it in those terms keeps the appeal within the Act and makes success measurable. Either the information is supplied or it is not, and a later stage can judge that result without having to reconstruct what the applicant wanted.

Where the appeal attacks a refusal, one further provision should be brought forward and invoked in terms, because it alters who has to persuade whom. Section 19(5) provides that in any appeal proceedings, the onus to prove that a denial of a request was justified shall be on the Public Information Officer who denied the request. The direction of the burden is the heart of the matter. The appellant does not have to prove entitlement. The officer has to justify denial. An appeal that quotes the provision changes the posture of the hearing. It tells the appellate officer, in the language of the Act itself, that the question is not whether the applicant has made out a case for disclosure but whether the officer who denied the request can justify the denial that was made. This burden is the provision applicants most often fail to use, and it costs the applicant nothing to invoke it. The grounds in such an appeal are not offered as proof of entitlement. They are offered as answers to a justification that the officer is required to produce.

Disposal of the first appeal is itself governed by a time limit. Section 19(6) provides that an appeal under Section 19(1) or Section 19(2) shall be disposed of within thirty days of receipt, or within an extended period not exceeding a total of forty five days from the date of filing, for reasons to be recorded in writing. The ordinary period is thirty days from receipt. The ceiling on any extension is a total of forty five days from the date of filing, which prevents the extension from becoming an open ended postponement of the kind that produced the appeal in the first place. The condition attached to the extension is that reasons be recorded in writing, so an authority that takes the longer period must be able to show why the longer period was needed.

An undecided first appeal at day forty five is not a dead end. The failure to decide the first appeal within its period is the event that starts the second appeal clock, because the ninety days of Section 19(3) run from the date the decision should have been made. The applicant does not need a decision in hand in order to move forward. The absence of a decision by the date it was due is itself a sufficient starting point, just as the absence of a decision on the original application was a sufficient starting point for the first appeal. At each stage the Act refuses to allow silence to become a bar to the next stage. Silence is converted, first into a deemed refusal, and then into a date from which the next appeal may be filed.

One small practical matter closes this part of the article. No fee is charged for a first appeal to a central public authority. Some states prescribe an appeal fee under their own rules, and an applicant appealing within a state authority should check the rule that applies to that authority rather than assume that the central position governs everywhere.

The second appeal: taking the file to the Information Commission

The second appeal takes the file out of the public authority altogether and places it before a body that stands outside the authority whose handling of the request is in question, and the institution that receives the second appeal, its composition and its working are the subject of the profile of the Central Information Commission, which may be read alongside the account of the appeal itself that follows here. The change of forum is the first thing to understand about Section 19(3), because so much else in the provision follows from it. Within the authority, the applicant was asking a senior officer to correct a junior officer, in surroundings that belonged to both of them. Before the Commission, the applicant is asking an outside institution to judge the authority’s decision, or its failure to decide, on a record that the authority does not control. The relief, if it is granted, no longer depends on the authority changing its own mind. It comes as a decision of the Commission, with the binding character that Section 19(7) gives it and with the powers that Section 19(8) places behind it. That is why the second appeal, although it is called an appeal in the same word as the first, is a different kind of proceeding in substance.

Section 19(3) provides that a second appeal against the decision under Section 19(1) lies within ninety days from the date on which the decision should have been made or was actually received, with the Central Information Commission or the State Information Commission, as the case may be. The starting point follows the pattern already seen at the first stage. Where the first appellate officer gave a decision, the date of its actual receipt governs. Where the first appellate officer gave no decision within the period allowed, the date on which the decision should have been made governs, and the applicant is not held waiting for a decision that the period for giving it has already passed. Between them the two starting points ensure that neither a late decision nor a missing decision can be used to defeat the second appeal before it is filed.

Which Commission receives the appeal depends on the level of the public authority, and the rule is simple enough that error on this point is difficult to excuse and costly to repair. The Central Commission is the forum for central public authorities, and the State Commission is the forum for state public authorities. The applicant’s file goes to the Commission of the authority’s own level. It does not go to the Commission that happens to be nearer, or more familiar, or thought to be quicker, and it does not become a central matter because the applicant would prefer a central hearing. Sending the file to the wrong Commission wastes the one resource the procedure does not replenish, which is time. Days spent in the wrong forum are days gone from a procedure that is already measured in periods of thirty days, forty five days, and ninety days, and no later diligence can restore them. The applicant should therefore settle the level of the authority before the second appeal is prepared, using the identity of the authority that held the information and whose officer dealt with the request, and should address the appeal accordingly.

The Commission may admit the appeal after ninety days if satisfied the appellant was prevented by sufficient cause from filing in time. The provision mirrors the condonation that the proviso to Section 19(1) gives at the first stage, and the same discipline applies. The Commission has to be satisfied. Sufficient cause must be pleaded and shown. The appellant who relies on the provision should set out the cause in the appeal itself, in order and with its dates, identifying what prevented the filing and covering the period of the delay with an account that the Commission can test. The better course is to file within the period and to keep condonation for the case in which prevention, properly so called, made timely filing impossible.

The decision that emerges at the end of a second appeal carries a weight that neither of the earlier stages possesses. Section 19(7) provides that the decision of the Commission shall be binding. The sentence is short, and its brevity is part of its meaning. The Commission’s decision is not a recommendation that the authority may accept or set aside according to its own view of the matter. It binds. For the applicant, that binding character is what makes the long route through the first appeal worth travelling, because it means that success at this stage is success in a form that the authority must obey. For the authority, it means that the second appeal cannot be treated as another round of correspondence in which the original position can simply be restated. The file that arrives before the Commission will be decided, and the decision will govern what happens to the request with which the whole matter began.

Section 19(8) sets out what the Commission can do in its decision, and the catalogue deserves to be taken in prose rather than as a bare list, because the powers are distinct and an applicant who understands them can frame the relief sought with precision. In its decision the Commission has power to require the public authority to take the steps necessary to secure compliance with the Act, including providing access to information in a particular form, appointing an information officer, publishing information, and changing record practices. Providing access in a particular form matters where the dispute was about the form in which access was given or withheld. Appointment of an information officer addresses the case in which the machinery of the Act was missing at the point where the applicant needed it. Publishing information and changing record practices look beyond the single request to the manner in which the authority keeps and releases the information it holds.

The same subsection carries powers of a more personal kind. The Commission may require the public authority to compensate the complainant for any loss or other detriment suffered, and an applicant who seeks compensation should be ready to identify the loss or detriment relied on. The Commission may impose any of the penalties provided under the Act, a power that leads directly to Section 20 and is considered with that section shortly. And the Commission may reject the application, a reminder placed within the catalogue itself that the powers are powers of decision and not guarantees of success. The Commission decides on the record before it, and that record is the one the applicant and the authority have together made through the application, the first appeal, and the second appeal itself.

The penalty provision gives the Commission’s decision a sharpness that no other part of the appellate scheme possesses. Section 20(1) applies where a complaint or appeal is decided and the Commission is of the opinion that the information officer has, without any reasonable cause, refused to receive an application, or has not furnished information within the time specified, or has denied the request in bad faith, or knowingly given incorrect, incomplete or misleading information, or destroyed information that was the subject of the request, or obstructed its furnishing. In any of those cases the Commission shall impose a penalty of Rs 250 for each day until the application is received or the information is furnished, subject to a ceiling of Rs 25,000. The rate and the ceiling together define the shape of the penalty. It grows by the day, which connects it to the delay or default that produced it, and it stops at a fixed maximum, which keeps its scale within the bounds the Act has chosen. Each further day of default adds to the sum until the ceiling is reached, so the provision presses hardest on the officer who allows a default to continue after it has been identified.

The grounds in Section 20(1) should be read with care, because penalty is not imposed for every wrong decision. The grounds concern the manner of the officer’s conduct. Refusal to receive an application without reasonable cause attacks the procedure at its entry point. Failure to furnish information within the time specified attacks it at the point of the duty the Act fixes most plainly. Denial in bad faith, the knowing supply of incorrect, incomplete or misleading information, the destruction of information that was the subject of the request, and obstruction in furnishing it each describe a quality of behaviour that goes beyond error. An applicant who invokes penalty should therefore address conduct, tying the invocation to the facts of the file, to the dates on which things were done or left undone, and to the absence of reasonable cause where that absence is part of the ground relied on.

Two safeguards stand inside the penalty provision. Before any penalty is imposed, the officer must be given a reasonable opportunity of being heard, and the Act does not allow penalty to be imposed unheard. The burden of proving that the officer acted reasonably and diligently lies on the officer, per the provisos to Section 20(1). That allocation is consistent with Section 19(5), under which the officer who denied a request carries the onus of justifying the denial. The applicant’s task is to place the default before the Commission with the clarity the record allows. The officer’s task is then to prove the reasonableness and diligence that the provision makes the answer to penalty. Section 20(2) adds a recommendation of disciplinary action for persistent default. Penalty is imposed on the officer personally, not on the authority, which is why it concentrates minds in a way departmental correspondence does not. A penalty that falls on the officer who handled the request reaches the individual whose conduct is in question, and delay and obstruction therefore carry a personal price.

A shorter provision must be fitted into the account of the second appeal before the parallel route is considered, because it affects how some second appeals are heard. Section 19(4) provides that where the decision appealed against relates to information of a third party, the Commission shall give the third party a reasonable opportunity of being heard. The treatment here is short, in keeping with the fuller treatment of the third party procedure elsewhere in this article. It is enough to register that the third party is not a stranger to the second appeal when the information in dispute is the third party’s information, and that the Commission’s hearing will make room for that party to be heard before a decision is given on disclosure.

Alongside the appeal there stands a parallel door. Section 18 permits a complaint to be made directly to the Commission on the grounds the section lists, in substance that the authority has not appointed an information officer and access has been refused in consequence, that the applicant has been refused access to information requested, that no response was received within the time limit, that the fee demanded is unreasonable, that the information given is incomplete, misleading or false, and any other matter relating to requesting or obtaining access to records under the Act. In inquiring, the Commission has the powers of a civil court in the matters Section 18(3) lists, including summoning and enforcing attendance, requiring discovery and inspection of documents, and receiving evidence on affidavit. A complaint is therefore not a letter of protest that the Commission may read and set aside. It opens an inquiry in which attendance can be compelled, documents can be required and inspected, and evidence can be taken in the forms the section provides.

The distinction between the two routes should be stated cleanly. The appeal under Section 19 attacks a decision, or the failure to make one, after the first appeal stage, and ends in a binding decision with the powers of Section 19(8) behind it. The complaint under Section 18 takes a grievance about the working of the Act straight to the Commission, and the Commission’s practice treats the two as different doors into the same building, with the appeal the structured route for a disappointed applicant and the complaint the route where the complaint is about the system itself. A complainant should not assume that the complaint route can be used to bypass the first appeal and obtain, by complaint, an order for disclosure in every case. The stages of Section 19 exist, and they carry the clocks and burdens described in this part of the article. The complaint route has its own proper field in the grounds Section 18 lists, and within that field it is a remedy of real substance backed by the inquiry powers of a civil court.

The honest constraint on this stage must be stated without figures. The Act prescribes no time limit within which the Commission itself must decide a second appeal or complaint, and at many commissions the wait for a hearing runs to months and beyond. Every earlier stage carries its period, but at the Commission’s own door the periods stop. That is not a reason to avoid the second appeal, which remains the route to a binding decision and to the powers and penalties that attend it. It is a reason to file with open eyes. The applicant who knows this at filing, and keeps the file complete, is in a different position from the applicant who learns it at the hearing. A complete file travels through a long wait without losing its force, while an incomplete file wastes the wait, because the hearing, when it comes, will turn on documents that should have been gathered when the events were fresh.

Keeping the file that wins the appeal

Every appeal under this Act is decided on paper. That single fact governs more outcomes than any argument made in a hearing room, because the paper is what survives, what can be checked, and what can be counted. The application as filed, the proof that it was filed and when it was filed, the acknowledgement if any was given, the reply if any was sent, and the dates that connect those pieces together form the record on which the appellate officer and, later, the Commission must work. An applicant may remember a visit to an office with complete clarity and may describe a conversation at a counter in convincing detail, and that memory will still lose to a document that another party produces, or to the absence of a document that the applicant ought to have produced. The applicant who keeps the set wins arguments that the applicant with a story loses, and the reason is not a preference for form over substance. The reason is that limitation under Sections 19(1) and 19(3) is arithmetic, and arithmetic runs on documents. Thirty days and ninety days are not impressions. They are intervals measured between dates that have to be proved, and a date that cannot be proved from the file is a date that invites dispute at the very moment when the applicant can least afford it.

The set itself is neither large nor complicated, and its modesty is part of its strength. It begins with the signed copy of the application as sent, kept exactly as it left the applicant’s hands, so that the wording of the request, the name of the officer to whom it was addressed, and the date written on it can be shown without reconstruction. Alongside it belongs the postal receipt and, where registered post or speed post was used, the delivery record that shows when the envelope reached the authority. The fee belongs in the same set, in the form of the Indian Postal Order counterfoil or the copy of the demand draft and the fee receipt that followed, because a question about whether the application was accompanied by the proper fee is answered by paper and by nothing else. Where delivery was made by hand, the acknowledgement stamped at hand delivery takes the place that the postal record takes in a posted filing, and it should be kept with the same care. Where a reply arrives, the reply itself belongs in the set, and so does the reply envelope with its postmark where the date of posting is in issue, because the date on a letter and the date on which it entered the post are not always the same date, and the difference can matter when a reply is said to have been sent within time. The final piece is a one page diary of dates, written plainly and kept in order: filed, received, reply due, replied or deemed refused, first appeal filed, decided or not, second appeal filed. That diary is the thread that ties the documents together, and without it even a complete set of papers can become a pile that has to be sorted under pressure.

Keeping those pieces in separate places defeats the purpose of keeping them at all. A receipt in a drawer, a scan in a phone gallery, and a date held only in memory are three fragments, and fragments fail when an appeal has to be drafted against a deadline. The set is small, and it should live in one place rather than in a drawer, a phone gallery and a memory. An applicant who keeps photographs or scans of the whole set together and checks them through a viewer for office files that opens spreadsheets, documents and presentations in one place before the appeal is drafted can place the diary of dates beside the documents themselves, so the diary and the documents are reconciled while there is still time to repair a gap. That reconciliation is quiet work, and it is the work that decides whether an appeal begins from strength. If the diary records a filing date that the postal receipt does not support, the discrepancy is found while a delivery record can still be obtained. If the fee counterfoil is missing, its absence is noticed before an opponent or an appellate officer notices it. If the reply envelope was discarded and the date of posting later becomes the central question, the loss is understood early, and the appeal can be framed honestly around what the remaining papers can and cannot prove.

Practical caution follows from the same principle, and it begins at the moment of sending. An application should be sent by a mode that generates proof, whether that mode is registered post, speed post, or hand delivery against a stamped copy. Each of those modes leaves something behind in the applicant’s hands that an independent record can later confirm. An ordinary post application is an application whose filing date the applicant may never be able to prove, because ordinary post was designed to carry a letter and not to certify its journey. The saving made by choosing the cheaper and quieter mode is small, and the cost, when the date is disputed, is the entire foundation of the appeal. The same discipline applies after the first filing. Copies of the appeals and their proofs belong with the original set, kept in the same place and in the same order, because a second appeal is not a fresh start that makes the earlier papers irrelevant. It is a continuation that rests on them. Where the reply arrives by email or through the online portal, the method changes and the discipline does not. The message should be saved, and the registration number that the portal assigns should be saved with it, so that an electronic filing can be proved with the same clarity that a postal receipt gives to a paper filing. A file kept in that manner does not guarantee that an appeal succeeds on its merits. It guarantees something prior and necessary, which is that the appeal will be heard on its merits at all, rather than lost in a preliminary argument about what was filed, when it was filed, and whether it was filed in the form the Act requires.

The mistakes that kill applications

The commonest mistakes are made before an application reaches an office at all, and they are mistakes of framing. Asking a question instead of seeking a record is the first of them, and asking why is the second, and together they are the two framing errors analysed at the start of this article and still the commonest cause of refusal. A public authority holds files, registers, orders, reports, and correspondence, and the Act gives a citizen access to material of that kind. A request framed as a question invites the authority to treat it as a demand for an answer, an explanation, or an opinion, none of which sits in a file waiting to be copied. A request that asks why a decision was taken invites the same response in a sharper form, because reasons that were never recorded cannot be supplied from a record, and reasons that were recorded belong in the noting, the order, or the correspondence that contains them. The applicant who names the record obtains the material from which an answer may be drawn. The applicant who asks the question and demands the reason leaves the authority with an easy refusal and leaves himself with nothing to appeal against except the refusal itself, which was produced by the framing he chose.

A related error is to seek information that the authority does not hold and is not required to maintain. The retrieval task set by an application must correspond to a record keeping duty, to a file that the office keeps, a register that it maintains, or material that its functions cause it to hold. Where a request asks for a compilation that the office has never made, a summary that no officer was ever required to prepare, or an analysis that exists only because the applicant has imagined it, the answer that no such record exists may be accurate, however unsatisfying it feels. That answer is difficult to displace on appeal because the appeal, like the application, runs on records, and an appellate officer cannot direct the supply of a document that was never created and never required to be created. The discipline that avoids the error is the same discipline that improves every application. The applicant asks what the office holds in the ordinary course of its work, how that material is arranged, and which part of it answers the need that prompted the request. A request shaped around an existing record can be refused only on a ground the Act recognises, and that is the ground on which an appeal can be fought with some prospect of success.

The shotgun application looks like the opposite of carelessness and often comes recommended by forum advice, yet it usually produces the weakest result of all. The same wide request is fired at many authorities at once, in the hope that one of them will hold something and that the combined replies will amount to a complete answer. What follows, in the ordinary course, is transfers, partial replies, and no complete answer anywhere. Each authority supplies the fragment that falls within its own holding, transfers the rest, or replies that the subject belongs elsewhere, and the applicant is left managing several files, several clocks, and several incomplete accounts of the same matter. Responsibility dissolves between offices because the application was never directed with precision to the office that holds the record. One specified request to the authority that holds the record outperforms the shotgun approach almost every time, because it places a clear duty on a named officer, starts a single and provable clock, and produces either the record, a refusal that can be appealed, or a silence that the statute converts into a deemed refusal. Breadth feels safer than precision. In this procedure, precision is the safer course, and breadth is the course that allows every recipient to answer in part and no recipient to answer in full.

Fee defects are smaller errors with larger consequences, because each of them converts a filing into a non filing. The missing fee is the plainest case, where an application travels without the payment that the procedure requires and arrives as a request that the office is not bound to process as a filing under the Act. The blank postal order carries the same defect in a form that applicants find harder to accept, because an instrument was enclosed and effort was made, yet an order without the payee and particulars completed cannot do the work that a fee must do. The draft drawn on the wrong payee fails for a corresponding reason, since payment directed to a person or account other than the one required is not payment in the form the filing demands. The exemption claimed without the certificate fails in its own way, because the exemption depends on the proof that supports it, and a claim asserted without that proof leaves the fee unpaid in the eyes of the procedure. None of these defects concerns the merit of the information sought. Each concerns whether an application in law was made, and an appeal built on a filing that is treated as no filing begins with a weakness that argument about the importance of the record cannot cure. The check is brief and unglamorous. The fee is present, the instrument is complete, the payee is correct, and the certificate accompanies the claim of exemption, or the application is not ready to send.

The unprovable application combines several of the earlier errors into a single fragile filing. No copy is kept, so the applicant cannot show the exact words that were sent or the officer to whom they were addressed. No proof of posting is kept, so the date of filing rests on assertion. No contact address is given in a usable form, so the authority cannot respond even if it is willing to respond, and a reply directed to an incomplete or absent address becomes another dispute about responsibility. The applicant in that position cannot count days with confidence because the starting date is uncertain, cannot frame an appeal with precision because the original request cannot be reproduced, and cannot answer the simplest preliminary questions without relying on recollection. The authority, for its part, may have received the envelope, may have missed it, or may have acted on it in a way that left no trace the applicant can follow. None of that uncertainty helps either side, and all of it was avoidable at the cost of a copy, a receipt, and a clear address. An application is not complete when it is written. It is complete when it is written, copied, addressed for a reply, and sent in a manner that the applicant can later prove.

The grievance dressed as a request is a different kind of error, because the underlying complaint may be entirely genuine and the remedy chosen may still be the wrong one. The Act supplies records, not redress. It will not transfer the officer, cancel the penalty, or allot the house, because those are acts of a different authority exercised through a different procedure on different grounds. An applicant who asks for them through an information request receives, at best, papers that describe the decision he objects to, and at worst a refusal that the request seeks action rather than information. Neither outcome corrects the wrong that prompted the filing. The applicant who needs the underlying wrong corrected must pursue the grievance through its own channel in parallel, and use the information obtained as evidence there. That parallel discipline matters because the two tracks serve different purposes and operate under different limits. The information track can expose the file, the order, and the reasoning recorded at the time. The grievance track can seek the correction, the cancellation, or the allotment itself. Confusing the two tracks wastes the limitation periods of both, since weeks spent waiting for an information reply to deliver a remedy it cannot deliver are weeks in which the grievance remedy may become harder, or may cease, to obtain.

The final two mistakes occur after an application has been properly framed and filed, and they are mistakes of surrender and delay. Giving up at silence treats no reply as the end of the matter, when the statute has already converted silence into a deemed refusal and opened the appeal. Silence is therefore not a wall. It is a step in the procedure, with legal consequences that favour the applicant who recognises it and acts on it, and it harms only the applicant who reads it as defeat and stops. Letting the appeal dates pass is the graver version of the same failure. The thirty days for the first appeal and the ninety days for the second are the two dates applicants lose cases on, because those intervals are short enough to be consumed by waiting, by correspondence, by hope that a late reply will arrive, or by the ordinary press of other work. Condonation for sufficient cause is a discretion, not an entitlement, and an applicant who allows a date to pass in reliance on indulgence has exchanged a right that could have been exercised in time for a request that may or may not be granted. The file, the diary of dates, and the willingness to treat silence as a ground for appeal rather than as an ending are the protections against both errors, and they cost far less than the rights they preserve.

The honest limits of the remedy

An honest account of this remedy has to begin with the structure of the first appeal, because that structure contains both its value and its weakness. The first appeal is decided inside the same authority whose officer refused the information or stayed silent in the face of the application. The appellate officer is senior in rank to the officer whose decision is under challenge, and that seniority brings a real authority to direct supply, to correct a refusal that cannot be defended, and to require the office below to produce what it withheld. Seniority does not, however, remove the appellate officer from the institution whose conduct is in question. He is also a colleague within the same institution, working among the officers whose files and decisions form the subject of the appeal, and sharing the habits and loyalties that any institution develops over time. That is the structural criticism of the design, and it is not answered by pretending otherwise. An applicant is entitled to understand that the first tier of appeal is an internal tier, with the strengths of internal authority and the limits of internal distance, and to frame expectations accordingly rather than to discover the design only after an adverse order arrives.

The first appeal nevertheless performs functions that no applicant can afford to skip, even where confidence in its outcome is modest. It creates the record on which everything later depends, because the appeal states the applicant’s case in writing, the authority is required to answer it, and the order that follows fixes the terms of the dispute. It forces the authority to state a position, rather than to rest on a vague refusal or on silence, and a stated position can be tested in a way that silence and vagueness cannot. It is also the jurisdictional key to the Commission, the step that opens the door to the second appeal and to an authority outside the institution whose officer made the original decision. To treat the first appeal as pointless because it is internal is therefore to misunderstand its place in the sequence. Its value lies partly in the relief it may give and partly, and often more reliably, in the record it builds, the position it extracts, and the jurisdiction it unlocks. An applicant who files it carefully, within time and on the papers kept from the start, loses nothing by its internal character and preserves everything that the later stage requires.

Beyond the first appeal, the timetable becomes less reassuring, and candour requires that to be said plainly. The Commission stage has no statutory clock of its own, and queues at many commissions are long. A remedy designed for thirty day answers can take far longer to enforce, and the distance between the speed promised at the application stage and the delay encountered at the enforcement stage is one of the most common sources of disillusion among applicants. That delay does not make the remedy worthless, and it does not excuse an authority that refused without ground or remained silent without explanation. It does mean that an applicant who begins the process in expectation of a swift correction at every stage has been given the wrong expectation, and applicants are entitled to know that before they begin rather than after they have invested months in a sequence whose final stage moves at a pace the statute does not control. Planning follows from that knowledge. Records are kept because papers may be needed long after they were filed, dates are recorded because limitation may be argued long after the event, and parallel grievance proceedings are not postponed in the false belief that an information appeal will resolve the underlying wrong in short order.

Risk belongs in the same honest account, stated plainly and without dramatising what is already serious enough in plain language. An applicant who seeks information about a powerful interest may face pressure, hostility at the counter, or worse, and no provision of this Act prevents it. The Act creates a right to seek records and a procedure for appealing against refusal, and it does not place an officer, a guard, or a remedy between the applicant and a person who resents the inquiry itself. That exposure should not be exaggerated into a claim that every sensitive request leads to retaliation, and it should not be minimised into a suggestion that courage is a substitute for care. The separate statute enacted for those who expose wrongdoing is the subject of the detailed account of the Whistle Blowers Protection Act 2014, and the existence of a separate framework of that kind is itself an indication that disclosure, complaint, and retaliation were understood to raise questions that an information statute alone does not settle. An applicant who judges that a request touches a powerful interest should make that judgement deliberately, keep the file in order, and understand the difference between a right on paper and protection in fact.

Help with the process itself belongs in the account as well, because cost should not decide whether a well framed application is pursued. An applicant who cannot afford assistance with framing an application or pursuing an appeal may be entitled to free legal services under the legal services framework, which is the subject of the explanatory guide to the Legal Services Authorities Act 1987. The relevance of that framework here is practical rather than decorative. Framing determines whether a request seeks a record or asks a question, forum determines whether an appeal is filed before the authority that can hear it, and limitation determines whether it is filed in time to be heard at all, and each of those matters is one on which assistance, where it is available without fee, can change the outcome before any question of merit is reached. The general position set out in this article is information about how the procedure works and is not advice on any individual case, and an applicant whose matter turns on a limitation date or a forum question should take advice on the facts of that matter, because limitation periods and forum rules are unforgiving. That distinction protects the reader as much as it limits the article, since procedure described in general terms can guide the preparation of a filing, while a date counted wrongly or a forum chosen wrongly in a particular matter can end a case that the general description made appear straightforward.

The verdict that the whole procedure supports is a narrow and namable claim, and its narrowness is what makes it useful. The Act rewards the applicant who asks for a record, files it against the right officer with the right fee, counts the four dates, and treats silence as a step in the procedure rather than its end. Each element of that claim corresponds to a failure that this article has examined. Asking for a record corrects the framing error that turns a filing into a question. Filing against the right officer corrects the shotgun error that disperses responsibility among authorities that do not hold the material. Paying the right fee, in a complete instrument drawn in favour of the correct payee or accompanied by the proof that supports an exemption, corrects the defect that converts a filing into a non filing. Counting the four dates corrects the surrender that follows silence and the delay that allows the thirty days and the ninety days to pass unnoticed. None of those elements requires influence, wealth, legal training, or a fortunate connection inside an office. Each requires attention at a moment when attention is cheap, before the envelope is sealed, before the clock begins to run, and before a reply or an absence of reply has to be interpreted under pressure.

A right that a citizen cannot operate is not a right in any sense that matters to the citizen who holds it, whatever its dignity in the text that declares it. This one can be operated with a sheet of paper, Rs 10, and a calendar, and that plain fact should not be allowed to obscure the discipline that the paper, the fee, and the calendar each demand. The sheet of paper must carry a request for a record that the authority holds, addressed to the officer charged with supplying it, and it must be copied and kept. The fee must travel with it in proper form, and its proof must be kept with the copy. The calendar must carry the dates that the statute sets running, entered when the filing is made and consulted before they expire, so that a deemed refusal becomes an appeal and an appeal becomes a second appeal where the first order fails to give the record. The distance between the applications that succeed and the applications that die is almost never the law, because the law is the same law for the applicant who receives the file and for the applicant who receives a refusal, a transfer, or silence. It is the framing, the fee, and the follow through. Those three things lie within the applicant’s control in a way that the attitude of a counter clerk, the length of a commission queue, and the internal loyalties of a first appellate officer do not, and the procedure rewards the applicant who understands that division and acts on the part of it that is his to command.

That division also explains why preparation carries more weight than indignation in this procedure. Indignation may be justified by a refusal, by silence, or by a delay that the statute does not control, and it still cannot supply a missing receipt, reconstruct a request that was never copied, or restore a date that was allowed to pass. Preparation can do the first two of those things before they become losses, and it can prevent the third altogether. The applicant who has done that preparation meets each stage with the papers the stage requires, and meets it in time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What are the steps to file an RTI application?

Identify the public authority that holds the record and the Public Information Officer designated for it. Draft a short request that names the records wanted, the office that holds them and the period they cover, in English, Hindi or the official language of the area. Attach the application fee of Rs 10, or a copy of a below poverty line certificate if the exemption is claimed. Submit the application in person against an acknowledgement, by registered or speed post, through an Assistant Public Information Officer, or online where the authority is covered. Note the date of filing. A reply is due in thirty days; against silence or refusal, file a first appeal in thirty days and a second appeal in ninety.

Q: Is any particular form required for an RTI application?

The Act prescribes no form. Section 6 requires a request in writing or through electronic means, specifying the particulars of the information required and accompanied by the prescribed fee, and nothing more. For central public authorities an application on plain paper, or in the text box of the online portal, is a valid application if it identifies the information officer addressed, the information sought and the applicant’s address for reply. Some states have prescribed a format in their own fee rules; the Maharashtra rules, for example, carry a format as an annexure. Where a state format exists, use it; where none exists, a clear plain-paper request cannot be rejected for want of a form.

Q: In which languages can an RTI application be made?

Section 6(1) permits a request in English or Hindi or in the official language of the area in which the application is being made. The choice belongs to the applicant, and an authority cannot insist that a request be rewritten in another of the three. The provision also covers the applicant who cannot write at all: where a request cannot be made in writing, the information officer is required to render all reasonable assistance to the person making the request orally so that the request is reduced to writing. An oral request so reduced carries the same force as a written one, and the same thirty-day clock runs from its receipt.

Q: What does it cost to file an RTI application?

For a central public authority the application fee is Rs 10 under the Right to Information Rules, 2012. Providing the information may cost more: Rs 2 for each page of A-3 or smaller size, the actual cost of larger copies, samples or models, Rs 50 for a diskette or floppy, the first hour of inspection free and Rs 5 for each later hour or fraction, and postal charges above Rs 50. A person below the poverty line pays neither fee, provided a copy of the government certificate is enclosed. A first appeal to a central authority carries no fee. States prescribe their own fees under their own rules; Gujarat, for example, charges Rs 20 as the application fee.

Q: What happens when the Public Information Officer demands further fee before supplying the information?

The officer must send an intimation under Section 7(3) stating how the further fee has been calculated, together with the details of the applicant’s rights to seek a review of the fee demanded. The fee itself follows the rates in the fee rules: so much per page, the cost of the medium, inspection charges, heavy postage. The period between the despatch of that intimation and the payment of the fee is excluded from the thirty-day computation, so the clock pauses rather than restarts. An applicant who considers the demand excessive may pay and proceed, or carry the objection into the first appeal. If the authority has already broken its time limit, Section 7(6) requires the information to be supplied free of charge.

Q: Can you file an RTI application online?

Yes, for central public authorities. The RTI Online portal run by the Department of Personnel and Training has accepted applications and first appeals for central ministries and departments since August 2013, and the facility has been extended to other central public authorities that have been aligned with it; the fee is paid through the portal and the applicant receives a registration number against which the request can be tracked. The position of the states is uneven: some states run portals of their own for their public authorities, and in the others the application is made on paper to the information officer or through an Assistant Public Information Officer. Online filing changes the medium, not the law: the same fee, the same thirty days and the same appeals apply.

Q: Can you inspect records and take notes instead of asking for copies of them?

Yes. The right to information defined in Section 2(j) includes inspection of works, documents and records, taking notes and extracts from them, obtaining certified copies, and taking certified samples of material. An applicant who wants to see a file before deciding what to copy should say so in the application and ask for inspection on a stated day. Under the central fee rules the first hour of inspection is free and each subsequent hour or fraction of an hour costs Rs 5. Inspection is often the better instrument for a large file: it converts a copying bill for hundreds of pages into an hour with the register, after which certified copies of the few pages that matter can be sought.

Q: Can part of an RTI application be transferred to another public authority?

Yes. Section 6(3) directs the authority that receives an application to transfer it, or such part of it as may be appropriate, to the other public authority where the information is held by that authority or the subject matter is more closely connected with its functions. The transfer must be made as soon as practicable and in no case more than five days from the date of receipt, and the applicant must be informed of the transfer immediately. A request that straddles two departments therefore does not fail: each authority answers for its own part, and the applicant’s protection is the five-day limit and the duty to inform, which together prevent a misdirected file from disappearing into silence.

Q: How long does a public authority have to reply to an RTI application?

The ordinary period is thirty days from receipt of the request, under Section 7(1). Where the information concerns the life or liberty of a person, it must be provided within forty-eight hours of receipt. Five additional days are added where the application was handed to an Assistant Public Information Officer. Where a third party must be consulted under Section 11, the decision is to be made within forty days. Time taken between the despatch of a further fee intimation and its payment is excluded from the count. When the applicable period expires without a decision, Section 7(2) deems the request refused, and the applicant may appeal without waiting any longer.

Q: What do you do if there is no reply to an RTI application?

Treat the silence as a refusal, because the Act does. Section 7(2) provides that an information officer who fails to give a decision within the period specified is deemed to have refused the request, and a deemed refusal is appealable in exactly the same way as a written one. File the first appeal to the officer senior in rank to the Public Information Officer in the same authority within thirty days of the expiry of the reply period, enclosing the application and the proof of its filing and stating that no decision was received. Do not send reminders in place of the appeal: reminders do not stop limitation running, and the appeal does. Information supplied after the deadline must be given free of charge under Section 7(6).

Q: What happens if the information sought under the RTI Act relates to a third party?

Section 11 sets a consultation procedure. Where the officer intends to disclose information that relates to or has been supplied by a third party and has been treated as confidential by that party, the officer must give the third party written notice within five days of receiving the request, inviting a submission on the proposed disclosure. The third party has ten days from receiving the notice to make its representation. The officer must then decide within forty days of the original request, weighing the third party’s objection against the public interest in disclosure. A third party aggrieved by a decision to disclose may file a first appeal within thirty days of the order, and must be heard if the matter reaches the Commission.

Q: How do you file a first appeal under the RTI Act?

Address the appeal to the officer senior in rank to the Public Information Officer within the same public authority; the authority’s own publications name that officer. File within thirty days from the expiry of the reply period or from receipt of the decision, whichever your case presents. Enclose a copy of the original application and of the proof of its filing, a copy of the reply if one was given or a statement that none was received, the grounds taken shortly and in order, and the relief sought, which is supply of the information. No fee is charged for a first appeal to a central authority. Invoke Section 19(5) in terms: the onus of proving that a denial was justified lies on the officer who denied the request.

Q: How much time does the first appellate authority have to decide a first appeal?

Section 19(6) requires an appeal under Section 19(1) or Section 19(2) to be disposed of within thirty days of the receipt of the appeal. The period may be extended, but not beyond a total of forty-five days from the date of filing, and only for reasons recorded in writing. The extension is therefore neither automatic nor open-ended: an appellate authority that needs more than thirty days must say why on the record, and forty-five days is the outer wall whatever the reason. An applicant still waiting at the end of that period is not without a remedy, because the second appeal clock of Section 19(3) runs from the date the decision should have been made.

Q: What can you do if the first appeal is not decided within its time limit?

Proceed to the second appeal. Section 19(3) measures the ninety days for a second appeal from the date on which the decision should have been made or was actually received, and an appellate authority that has let its own thirty or forty-five days pass without deciding has fixed the starting date by its silence. File the second appeal to the Central or the State Information Commission, as the authority requires, stating the date the first appeal was filed, the date by which it should have been disposed of, and that no decision was received, and enclose the proof of filing of both the application and the first appeal. The Commission may also admit a later appeal where the appellant was prevented by sufficient cause from filing in time.

Q: When can you file a second appeal to an Information Commission?

A second appeal lies after the first appeal stage, against the decision made under Section 19(1) or against the failure to make one. Section 19(3) requires it to be filed with the Central Information Commission or the State Information Commission, as the case may be, within ninety days from the date on which the decision should have been made or was actually received. The ninety days therefore run from the first appellate authority’s order where there is one, and from the date that order fell due where the first appeal was never decided. The Commission may admit an appeal filed after ninety days if it is satisfied that the appellant was prevented by sufficient cause from filing the appeal in time.

Q: What is the difference between a complaint under Section 18 and an appeal under Section 19 of the RTI Act?

The appeal under Section 19 is the ladder built for a disappointed applicant: it attacks a decision of the information officer, or the failure to make one, and it ordinarily climbs through the first appeal inside the authority before reaching the Commission. The complaint under Section 18 is a direct approach to the Commission on the grounds the section lists: no information officer appointed, a refusal to receive an application or to give access, no response within the time limit, an unreasonable fee, or information that is incomplete, misleading or false. The complaint is about the working of the Act in the applicant’s case, taken straight to the body that supervises that working; the appeal is the structured route to an order for the information itself.

Q: Must the information be supplied in the form in which it was asked for?

Ordinarily, yes. Section 7(9) provides that information shall ordinarily be provided in the form in which it is sought. The qualification is practical rather than discretionary: the form need not be provided where doing so would disproportionately divert the resources of the public authority or would be detrimental to the safety or preservation of the record in question. An applicant who asks for certified copies of a register should receive certified copies; an applicant whose request, as framed, would require an office to compile a new compilation or expose a fragile original may be offered inspection or another form instead. Framing the request to the record as it is kept keeps the applicant on the strong side of the section.

Q: What proof of having filed an RTI application should an applicant keep?

Keep the complete paper trail, because every later step is counted from it. Retain a copy of the application exactly as filed, the fee instrument or its counterfoil and any receipt issued for it, and proof of the date of delivery: the registered or speed post receipt and delivery record, the stamped acknowledgement of a hand delivery, or the registration number and acknowledgement generated by the online portal. Keep every reply with its envelope where the date of posting matters, and copies of both appeals with their own proofs of filing. Add a simple diary of the dates: filed, reply due, replied or deemed refused, first appeal filed and decided, second appeal filed. Limitation under Section 19 is arithmetic, and arithmetic is proved with documents.

Q: What can you do if an office refuses to accept an RTI application?

A refusal to receive an application is itself a ground of complaint. Section 18(1) permits a complaint to the Information Commission where the applicant has been refused access through the machinery of the Act, including the situation in which no information officer has been appointed or an assistant officer has refused to accept an application or appeal for forwarding. Do not rely on the counter alone: send the application by registered or speed post to the information officer so that receipt is documented, or file through an Assistant Public Information Officer, or use the online portal where the authority is covered. Where a complaint or appeal is later decided, refusal to receive an application without reasonable cause is also one of the defaults for which Section 20 permits a penalty against the officer.

Q: What are the commonest reasons an RTI application is rejected?

The avoidable ones come first. Applications are refused because they ask questions, and especially questions beginning with why, instead of seeking records that exist; because they demand opinions, explanations or compilations the authority does not hold and is not required to create; because the fee is missing, the postal order is blank or drawn on the wrong payee, or a poverty line exemption is claimed without the certificate; and because the request is addressed to an authority that does not hold the record and cannot be identified from the application. The substantive refusals follow: material exempt under Section 8 or Section 9, and personal information about a third party. Most files that fail combine a framing defect with a fee defect, and both are within the applicant’s control.