The gaps in the implementation of the RTI Act

The Right to Information (RTI) Act completed 21 years today. Besides empowering citizens to demand information from public authorities, a key aspect of the RTI Act is the provision for suo motu mandatory disclosure of a variety of information on their websites so that people do not have to resort to filing requests under the Act for accessing basic information regarding any department.

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Section 4 (1) (b) of the Act lists 16 types of information, ranging from contact details of officials to budgetary expenditure, which are to be made public at regular intervals. Moreover, the Department of Personnel and Training has issued guidelines for the disclosure of additional information, under eight broad categories, including information related to procurement, public-private partnerships, and all RTI applications received by each department. An analysis, however, showed that such voluntary disclosure has not been followed.

With the number of official websites of the Union government and State governments running into the thousands, the scope of this analysis is restricted to the departments listed as Public Authorities (PAs) in the Government of India’s online portal for filing of applications under the RTI Act and the data presented in the annual reports of the Central Information Commission (CIC).

To ensure compliance with Section 4 of the RTI Act, the government has also made it mandatory for transparency audits to be conducted by third parties and the reports of such audits to be shared with the CIC.

The annual report for the year 2024-25 released earlier this year by the CIC says that of the 2,303 PAs from various departments registered with the Commission, only 1,446 had submitted third party audit reports, which is just 62.7% of the total registered.

Of those submitted, more than 50% scored Grade C or below, which meant that they had scored 80% or below in the transparency audit. Those with Grade E had scored below 60% in the audit.

Though nearly 37% of the registered PAs did not submit the audit reports, a look at the trend in the last five years showed that the compliance has improved year-on-year. In 2020-21, only 754 had submitted. This doubled to 1,443 in 2024-25.

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The Hindu independently verified the websites of the 94 departments under which these PAs come under. The guidelines recommend the uploading of the transparency audit reports on the websites. However, only 33 of the 94 websites had the audit reports for the year 2024-25. While a majority of them did not have the latest audit reports, a few had older reports.

An analysis on the information that is to be mandatorily disclosed under the RTI Act showed that, of the 94 departments, 56 authorities, or 62% have complied with this section on most categories, and have information from 2025-26. The websites of 26 departments did not have the information covered under the Act. For the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, there was no information available (Table 2). The remaining websites had either minimal or dated information on their websites.

The chart below shows the availability of transparency audit reports in the websites of 94 departments listed in the RTI portal

Meanwhile, the number of new RTI requests and its pendency with the CIC has grown over the years.

The Act states that PAs should provide “as much information suo motu to the public …so that the public have minimum resort to the use of this Act”. The efficient implementation of Section 4 can not only improve transparency but also reduce the pendency piling up with the CIC and State Information Commissions.

Data for the charts were sourced from the Central Information Commission (CIC) and websites of 94 government departments listed in the RTI portal of the Government of India. The authors are interning with The Hindu’s Data team

Gandla Sneha, Gauri Singavarapu and Sachin Swaraj are interning with The Hindu Data Team