A Right Waiting in Line

The Right to Information Act turned twenty-one in October. In Haryana it has more appeals waiting than at any point in its history, fewer reports to show for itself, and a new exemption that officers are reading as widely as they can.

Mandeep Singh Lamba
Advocate, Punjab and Haryana High Court, Chandigarh
31 October 2026

On 12 October, the day the Act completed twenty-one years, RTI activists from several districts of Haryana went to the Governor, Prof. Ashim Kumar Ghosh, with a seventeen-point memorandum on the working of the State Information Commission. P.P. Kapoor of the Jan Abhiyan Manch put their grievance in one line: in Haryana, he said, the Act had been reduced to a "joke". On the same day a national study by Satark Nagrik Sangathan reported that an appeal filed today before the Tripura or Madhya Pradesh commission would be decided in 2046.

Haryana is not Tripura. Its Commission still decides several thousand cases a year, and its Chief Information Commissioner has answered the activists in public. But anniversaries invite stock-taking, and the stock-taking here is uncomfortable. I practise mostly in service and constitutional matters, where an RTI reply is often the first document a client brings. What follows is drawn from the Commission's own figures, from news reports of the last few months, and from two appeals of my own.

I · The backlog

What the Commission's own numbers say

The Commission's year-wise progress statement, which runs from its first seven cases in 2005 to July 2026, is the plainest evidence we have. At the end of 2017, 1,980 appeals and complaints were pending. By July 2026 the figure was 9,544, the highest in the Commission's history.

The rise is not a story of a flood of new cases. Filings in 2025 (9,330) were in the same range as 2017 to 2019. What changed is the rate of decision. The Commission decided 9,394 cases in 2017 and 9,032 in 2019. It decided 6,457 in 2023 and 6,577 in 2025. In 2025 the backlog grew by 2,753 in a single year, and in the first seven months of 2026 it grew by another 2,661.

At the 2025 rate of disposal, the present backlog alone is about seventeen months of work, before a single new appeal is counted. The Commission's staffing explains part of this. In June 2026 five posts of State Information Commissioner were reported vacant, and an RTI reply obtained in October by Subhash, state convener of the Haryana Suchna Adhikar Manch, showed thirty staff posts lying vacant, including the Secretary to the Chief Information Commissioner and the Under Secretary. The Supreme Court warned, in its order of 30 October 2023 in Anjali Bhardwaj v. Union of India, that if posts in information commissions are not filled the right to information becomes a "dead letter".

II · Accountability

The report that stopped coming

Section 25 of the Act requires every State Information Commission to prepare a report at the end of each year on how the Act was implemented, and requires the State Government to lay it before the Legislature. The Haryana Commission's website lists fifteen such reports. The last one covers the calendar year 2020. Nothing has been published for 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 or 2025. The result is odd for a transparency body. The figures I have used above came out only because citizens filed RTI applications to find them.

The fifteenth report is worth reading, because it records problems that have only grown since. In 2020 only 48 public authorities sent the Commission the statistics that s.25(2) obliges them to send; in the report's words, "the rest of the public authorities did not respond." It records information officers pleading that records had been lost "in floods or by fire or destroyed due to termite", and district offices so short of photocopiers that "hand written and illegible information is sometimes furnished". Most tellingly, its last chapter notes that the Commission had made recommendations to the State Government in each of its previous fourteen reports, and that "decision on these recommendations has yet to be taken."

The same report gives a baseline we can no longer update. In 2020, 73,985 RTI applications were reported by those authorities that did report. Information was refused under sections 8 and 9 in 1,686 cases, about 2.3 per cent. The Commission issued 2,821 show-cause notices, imposed penalties in 387 cases totalling ₹72.51 lakh, recommended disciplinary action against 129 officers under s.20(2), and awarded compensation of ₹4.97 lakh in 140 cases under s.19(8)(b). Whether those numbers have risen or fallen since, no one outside the Commission can say from the public record.

III · From my own files

Two appeals, returned

In May and June 2025 I filed two RTI applications with the office of the Chief Secretary. One asked for the number of serving HCS officers facing criminal or civil cases, with their postings and the stage of each case. The other asked for the expenditure, events, vendors and outcomes of the Sant Mahapurush Samman Evam Vichar Prasar Yojana between 2014 and 2025. Both concern public servants and public money.

The first was refused on the ground that the information was personal and exempt under s.8(1)(j). That was in June 2025, five months before the DPDP Act changed the clause, when the exemption still carried its public-interest test. The second went from the CM Secretariat to the Information, Public Relations and Languages Department and was never answered. I filed first appeals in both. Neither was ever decided. With no decision in sight, I went to the Commission.

Both second appeals were taken up at the admission stage on 26 June 2026 and disposed of on the same day by orders identical word for word. Each recorded that the first appeal had not been decided, held that a second appeal lies "when the decision of the First Appeal is sought to be contested", and remanded the matter to the same First Appellate Authority to decide within thirty days, or forty-five at most. Here is how that order reached me.

An order giving the appellate authority thirty days took eighty-two days to reach the appellant. Sixteen months after the application, I am back where I was in July 2025, waiting on an officer who has already let the appeal lie for ten months.

There is also a question of law. Section 19(3) does not say that a second appeal lies only against a decision actually made. It allows a second appeal within ninety days "from the date on which the decision should have been made or was actually received." The words "should have been made" exist precisely for the case where the first appellate authority sits on the appeal. A remand in such a case asks the citizen to pay for the officer's default, and the order said nothing at all about that default.

To be fair to the Commission, its Chief Information Commissioner, T.V.S.N. Prasad, has explained the practice. He told The Hindu that more than half of the appeals reaching the Commission had bypassed the first appellate stage, that first appellate authorities are the "custodians of information", and that the Commission had for the first time begun issuing show-cause notices to them. Where an appellant has skipped the first appeal, sending the case back is right. But my appeals did not skip anything. They went through the first stage and stalled there. A remand that treats both situations alike, in a standard draft, does not make the system work "in the manner it should". It sends the citizen around the same loop. Nationally the risk is plain: the Satark Nagrik Sangathan study found that the Central Information Commission returned 14,603 appeals and complaints while registering 31,179, and that about 95 per cent of those returned were never filed again.

IV · Section 8(1)(j)

Personal information after the DPDP Act

The larger change of the last year came from Parliament, not from Panchkula. Section 44(3) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, brought into force in November 2025, rewrote s.8(1)(j). The clause used to exempt personal information unless a larger public interest justified disclosure, and it carried the proviso that information which cannot be denied to Parliament or a State Legislature shall not be denied to any person. Both the public-interest test and the proviso are gone. What remains exempts information "which relates to personal information".

Mr. Prasad's view, given to The Hindu, is that the "legal landscape has changed", that the DPDP Act overrides the RTI Act on personal information, and that "it is therefore not a matter of choice for us". The activists see the same clause from the other side. Harendra Dhingra, a senior RTI activist, says allotment letters, official orders, file notings and no-objection certificates are now being withheld by invoking it. The Commission itself, asked for the leave record of its own Chief and Commissioners, declined on the ground that it was personal information.

For those of us in service law the consequences are concrete. Even before the amendment, Girish Ramchandra Deshpande v. Central Information Commissioner (2013) treated an employee's service record and disciplinary proceedings as personal information, released only where a larger public interest was shown. With that test gone from the text, a seniority list, the minutes of a departmental promotion committee, the record of a rival candidate or the report of an inquiry can each be refused with a single line.

I would argue that the clause, even in its new form, does not reach that far. Information "relating to personal information" is information about a person: their health, their family, their private finances. An order a public servant signs, a noting recorded on a file, an NOC issued in the course of duty, is the act of the office. It belongs to the public authority, not to the individual. Reading the amended clause to cover every document that bears an officer's name would make the exemption swallow the Act. That reading is open to the High Court today, without waiting for anyone else.

The Supreme Court is seized of the larger question. In Venkatesh Nayak v. Union of India and connected petitions filed by the National Campaign for People's Right to Information and the Reporters' Collective, the Court issued notice on 16 February 2026 but refused to stay the amendment. The Chief Justice observed that "some ironing out of the creases might be needed to strike a balance." The matter is still pending, and until it is decided the amended clause is the law that information officers apply.

V · Penalties and money

Imposed on paper, recovered in part

Penalties under s.20 are what give the thirty-day limit its force. In the five years from 2021 to 2025 the Haryana Commission imposed penalties of ₹1.79 crore on defaulting information officers. Only ₹64.55 lakh, about 36 per cent, had been recovered, according to an RTI reply to Mr. Kapoor reported in June 2026. The Commission's own website lists 1,863 defaulting officers, from whom ₹2.94 crore remained unrecovered.

To its credit, Haryana has now put in place a mechanism to recover these penalties from the salaries of the officers concerned, reported in May 2026 as the first of its kind in the country. It came after Mr. Kapoor pursued the matter before the Haryana Lokayukta for six years. The test is whether the recovered figure moves.

The spending figures from the same reply, as of June 2026, are harder to defend. Over twenty years the State spent ₹113.42 crore on the Commission, mostly on the salaries of Commissioners and staff, and ₹47.63 crore on its new building in Sector 3, Panchkula. It spent ₹2.49 lakh on making people aware of the Act, and nothing at all in the last fifteen years. Section 26 places that duty of awareness and training squarely on the State Government.

VI · The memorandum

What the activists asked for

The memorandum of 12 October is a practical document. Apart from the delays and the use of s.8(1)(j), it asks for things that would cost little:

• An SMS to the appellant when an appeal or complaint is registered.

• Real compliance with suo motu disclosure under section 4 on department websites.

• Online RTI applications in all government offices.

• A government official, not the serving sarpanch, as the information officer in gram panchayats.

• A toll-free helpline for the Commission.

• Regular meetings between the Chief Information Commissioner and RTI applicants.

• Statewide awareness programmes on National Right to Information Day.

The Chief Information Commissioner has said the Commission has trained information officers and appellate authorities, and will hold district-wise online interactions with activists and the public, "an open house" that anyone can attend. That is welcome, and it is also a measurable promise.

VII · Remedies

What should change

1. Fill the posts. Appoint Commissioners against all vacant posts and fill the thirty staff vacancies. The Supreme Court's directions in Anjali Bhardwaj leave the State no discretion on this.

2. Publish the missing reports. Bring out the reports for 2021 to 2025 and lay them before the Vidhan Sabha, as section 25 requires. Publish monthly pendency and disposal figures on the website.

3. Decide, don't return. Where a first appeal has been filed and not decided in time, hear the second appeal under section 19(3), and act against the first appellate authority for the default. Where a remand is truly needed, pass a reasoned order and communicate it within days, not months.

4. Read section 8(1)(j) narrowly. Official acts, orders, notings and NOCs are not personal information. Every refusal should give reasons that can be tested on appeal.

5. Enforce section 4. Most of what people ask for, such as scheme expenditure, tender records and seniority lists, should already be on a website. Proactive disclosure cuts applications at the source.

6. Recover the penalties. Use the salary mechanism, and report what has been recovered each year.

7. Spend on awareness. A fraction of what the Commission costs, spent under section 26, would go further than any other reform here.

Conclusion

A right that waits

Haryana built the machinery of the RTI Act early and built it well. It had a Commission by November 2005, district hearings from 2012, a penalty-recovery mechanism, and now a building of its own. None of that is the measure of the Act. The measure is whether a citizen who asks a question gets an answer in time, and whether an officer who refuses without reason pays for it. By that measure, at twenty-one, the right to information in Haryana is a right that waits: in a queue of 9,544 cases, in returned appeals, and in annual reports that stopped after 2020. The Commission has said it wants to make the system function as it should. The first step is to let the public see, year by year, whether it does.

Sources

1. State Information Commission, Haryana, "Year wise progress report of the Commission", 2005 to July 2026.

2. State Information Commission, Haryana, Fifteenth Report on Implementation of the Right to Information Act, 2005 (1.1.2020 to 31.12.2020).

3. The Hindu Bureau, "Haryana RTI activists seek reforms in State Information Commission, submit 17-point memorandum to Governor", The Hindu, 12 October 2026.

4. Our Political Bureau, "RTI Act Turns 21: Commissions Choke on Backlogs; Appeals in Tripura, MP May Be Decided in 2046", The Economic Times, October 2026 (Satark Nagrik Sangathan, Report Card of Information Commissions 2025-26).

5. Ravinder Saini, "30 posts in Haryana State Information Commission vacant, over 9.5K cases pending: RTI", The Tribune, 8 October 2026. tribuneindia.com

6. Mukesh Tandon, "Haryana spent Rs 113 crore on info panel in 20 years, just Rs 2.5L on RTI awareness", The Tribune, 2 June 2026. tribuneindia.com

7. Mukesh Tandon, "Explained: How Haryana became 1st state to implement mechanism to recover RTI penalty from errant officers", The Tribune, 29 May 2026. tribuneindia.com

8. "'Some Creases To Be Ironed Out,' Supreme Court Refers Pleas Challenging DPDP Act Amendment To RTI Act To Larger Bench", LiveLaw, 16 February 2026. livelaw.in

9. "RTI Act Will Become 'Dead Letter': Supreme Court Directs States, Union To Fill Vacancies In Information Commissions", LiveLaw, 30 October 2023. livelaw.in

10. Girish Ramchandra Deshpande v. Central Information Commissioner, (2013) 1 SCC 212.

11. Right to Information Act, 2005, sections 4, 8(1)(j), 19, 20, 25 and 26; Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, section 44(3).

The views expressed are the author's own. Figures are as reported on the dates given and may have changed since.