More than 13.74 lakh applications were made under the Right to Information Act in 2019-20, an increase of 0.3 per cent from the 13.7 lakh receipts reported in 2018-19, according to the annual report of the Central Information Commission.
The increase in the number of RTI applications is significant because it comes despite fewer public authorities submitting their data to the Commission, according to an analysis of the report carried out by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.
In its report, the CIC acknowledges the existence of 2,193 public authorities. This is an all-time high. However, only 2,131 of them submitted RTI statistics to the CIC. Reporting compliance was 97.17 per cent in 2019-2020 as compared to 100 per cent in the previous year when all 2,145 registered public authorities had submitted data to the CIC.
The analysis of the CIC report showed that disclosure of personal information and exemption given to security and intelligence agencies became the basis for rejection of over 56 per cent of RTI applications in 2019-20.
Also, while an RTI application can be rejected only under the exemptions given in Sections 8, 9, 11 and 24 of the Act, the report shows that a non-specific “others” category has been used by government departments to reject applications.
A total of 62,123 applications were rejected by public authorities in 2019-20, out of which 38,064 were rejected citing exemptions provided under the Act, while 24,059 queries were rejected on reasons clubbed as “others”.
Every public authority reports the number of RTIs that remained pending from the previous year which got carried over to the current reporting year for disposal. Overall, there was an increase of more than 19 per cent in the backlog of pending RTI applications across public authorities in 2019-20 (3,10,110) as compared with the previous year (2,59,919).
Nothing in the Annual Report indicates that the CIC has probed the reasons behind the rise in the backlog of RTI applications, noted Venkatesh Nayak, programme head, Access to Information Programme, CHRI.
Interestingly, the Ministry of Defence reported the highest backlog at 1.15 lakh of which the Indian Army contributed more than 93 per cent.
Fewer RTI applications were transferred across public authorities under Section 6(3) of the RTI Act, in 2019-20. Only 10.86 per cent or 1.82 lakh of them were transferred in 2019-20 as compared to 11.41 per cent or 1.86 lakh during the previous year.
“It is laudable that these figures have come down from the all-time high of 14.46 per cent reported in 2014-15,” Nayak said.
