The SC’s ruling on RTI is only a minor victory
The judiciary is often not transparent at the district court level, which is the first point of contact for most litigants
On November 13, the Supreme Court (SC) held that the office of the Chief Justice of India is a public authority, and falls within the ambit of the Right to Information (RTI) Act.
A five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi upheld the 2010 Delhi High Court verdict, and dismissed three appeals filed by the secretary general of the Supreme Court and the Central Public Information officer of the apex court.
While the ruling is being hailed as a victory by many, it is, at best, a minor one. For instance, the SC judgment does not make it mandatory for judges to disclose their assets proactively. Additionally, there are far more serious issues with judicial transparency, especially at the district-level judiciary.
The district courts are often the first point of contact with the country’s justice system for a vast majority of litigants in the country. Hence, it is critical that district courts comply with the requirements of the RTI Act. In our report, Sunshine in the Courts, we found major issues in the enforcement of the RTI Act at the district-level judiciary. These shortcomings must be rectified for greater judicial transparency.
For instance, the RTI Act’s Section 28 allows “competent authorities”, such as the high courts (HC), to frame rules to carry out the provisions of the Act. But the report found that four high courts (Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Patna) did not even have any RTI rules for their respective district courts. This makes it impossible for applicants to exercise the provisions of the RTI Act against these courts, significantly increasing the discretion of the respective public information officers.
The report also found that 13 high courts rules did not specify the names of authority for collecting the RTI fees, in case an application was filed with a district court. The failure to identify such authority makes it difficult for an applicant to pay the fee for the RTI application, when the payment is being made through instruments such as postal orders.
The RTI Act’s Section 4 also imposes an obligation on public authorities, such as district courts, to disclose and disseminate information about their functioning — budgets, expenditure-related data, and administrative procedures — on their e-court websites. But we found that only the district courts in Kerala, Punjab, and Haryana have made detailed disclosures on their websites, but mostly in English, and not in the local languages. The worst performers are Assam, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and West Bengal. In these states, not a single district court has made any kind of disclosure under the RTI Act on their websites.
We also conducted an analysis of the compliance of the HC with the RTI Act on the basis of four indices: Legality Index (which assesses the legality of the high court RTI rules vis-á-vis the RTI Act); Convenience Index (which assesses the extent to which the RTI Rules framed by the high courts make it inconvenient for citizens to file RTI applications); Practice Index (which assesses the practices used by the Public Information Officers of the high courts to respond to RTI applications); and Disclosure Index (which assesses the quality of disclosures made by the High Courts under Section 4 of the RTI Act). As expected, the performance of the HC differed with the indices. For example, the Madras High Court topped the legality index but performed poorly on the convenience index. The district courts in most states still have a long way to go in order to comply with the RTI Act. But there is a possible road map for reform.
First, high courts must explicitly clarify the rules governing the filing of RTI applications with district courts. Second, in order to make Section 4 disclosures accessible, they must be available in the local language, in addition to English. Finally, these disclosures should be clearly marked and easily accessible on the e-Courts website.