One year on, revised RTI rules yet to be approved

NEW DELHI: Almost a year after it came out with draft RTI Rules 2017, the government seems to have put them in cold storage. There has been criticism the new rules failed to address recurrent issues like non-compliance of CIC orders and also gave more powers to the chief information commissioner leaving scope for misuse.

The revised rules, which had faced resistance, from a part of the central information commission, has not been approved yet. The requirement for framing fresh RTI Rules — that is the draft RTI Rules 2017 — was undertaken after a direction from the apex court. In March last year, the DoPT, under which the CIC comes, had come out with a set of rules.

The draft RTI Rules 2017 are aimed at changing the procedure of the Act, and not the Act itself. However, objections within the CIC had led to the CIC failing to unanimously approve the revised RTI rules. Officials say the file at present has not been put up for approval after the objections voiced by the information commissioners. The draft RTI Rules 2017 had also raised hackles of information activists, who had pointed to several flaws.


According to officials though, the revised RTI rules have significantly improved provisions, such as the introduction of procedures to deal with non-compliance of the information commissioners' (IC) orders. Not only users of the Act, but even the IC exercising its supervisory jurisdiction has faced non-compliance of its orders from public information officers (PIOs) and public authorities (the organisations/offices) that are to provide information. They have also come in for criticism from ICs who have criticised the introduction of new rules that give more powers to chief information commissioner to assign any RTI appeal to a commissioner in larger public interest. ICs Sridhar Acharyulu and Yashovardhan Azad had expressed strong reservations to insertion of a new Rule 15 and said it would be "misused" by the government. They had pointed out for the need for CIC to be seen as independent and "not a part of the government".