Only 0.41 per cent of Indians seek information under RTI Act: Study

NEW DELHI: India enacted the Right to Information Act a decade ago, but not even 1 per cent of the country’s population exercises its power under the transparency law. A nationwide study by Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative has revealed that only 0.37-0.41 per cent of India’s population sought information under the RTI Act in 2014.

As per the first of the annual survey on the number of citizens using their right to know, CHRI found that as a proportion of the electorate, people aged 18 years and above, this percentage works to 0.5-0.6 per cent of the population. Though the absolute number of RTI applications is increasing, the micro trend points to a male-female and rural-urban divide.

The study, which analyses data of different states, revealed that only Chhattisgarh among states captured the urban-rural break-up of RTI applicants. Less than a fifth of the applicants (19.85 per cent) were living in villages in the state. Although Chhattisgarh registered a 21 per cent increase in the number of RTI applications across the state in 2014 over that in the previous year, the proportion of rural applicants went down.




The study also shows that more men file RTI applications than women. “Only two state information commissions have captured gender break-up of RTI applicants – Chhattisgarh and Nagaland. In Chhattisgarh, women constituted 6.9 per cent of the RTI applicants while in Nagaland they comprise 2.53 per cent of the RTI applicants,” says the study. It points out that the number of women applicants has fallen over the years. In 2014, a similar study RAAG-2 report had shown that women comprise about 8 per cent of the total applicants, which is higher than the figures thrown up by the CHRI study.

An analysis of socio-economic background of applicants shows an increase in applicants from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Chhattisgarh, the only state which has captured the indicative trend, shows that RTI applicants belonging to Scheduled Castes nearly doubled in a year, with 6.37 per cent of the applicants belonging to Scheduled Castes.Similarly, the percentage of RTI applicants from Scheduled Tribes grew to 5.5 per cent in 2014 from 3.06 per cent in 2013.

“The steady increase in the absolute numbers as well as in terms of percentage augurs well for the success of RTI Act as it is primarily aimed at empowering the disadvantaged segments of society to hold government and its instrumentalities accountable,” says the report.