Points to Note from RTI Act
National Commission, where it was argued that the protection provided under Consumer Protection Act was in addition to the remedies available under any other statute. While the Commission agreed that the consumer forum was an additional remedy available to the consumer for redressal of his grievance, they also stated that they could not allow filing of an appeal against the order passed under some different Act (RTI in this case) and by a different authority. Finally they held that the complainant was ‘not’ the consumer under these circumstances. individual has received certain orders from the nodal and appellate authorities under RTI Act, then a consumer forum cannot appeal against that order. reads: “Bar on jurisdiction of courts: No court shall entertain any suit, application or other proceeding in respect of any order made, under this Act, and
Orders to Note
What We May Conclude
In case you fail to get the desired revert on your RTI, you may get lucky by appealing in consumer forums and may end up getting some compensation too. However, the district and state consumer forums’ decisions can be challenged and altered in the National Commission, wherein it has already been established that the RTI applicant is not a consumer. So, the right way forward will be to make a first appeal or a complaint to appellate authorities under RTI and a second one to the Information Commission.
The last point of appeal is, of course, the courts. Although the Central Act attempts to bar appeals to the courts, this is not constitutional. The Supreme Court of India has long recognized that the right to information is a fundamental constitutional right, which means that you can always take a case to the court in support of that right. Karnataka, before the State Commission of Karnataka, the bench headed by Justice Ashok Bhan held that “complainant cannot be considered as a consumer as defined under the Consumer Protection Act since there is a remedy available for the complainant to approach the appellate authority u/s 19 of the RTI Act, 2005.” versus Tasha Mandlekar case. The judgement read: “After respondent has lost its move to secure copy of the agreement in question under the Right to Information Act, before a Competent Authority also the Appellate Authority, this Commission cannot exercise revision jurisdiction sitting over the decisions rendered by these two authorities. After availing one remedy prescribed under the statute, taking recourse to Consumer Grievance Redressal Agency hoping for further relief was not permissible.”