ON OCTOBER 15, THE KARNATAKA HIGH COURT REFUSED to stay an order of the Karnataka State Information Commissioner (‘SIC’) blacklisting a person from making further requests for information under the Right to Information (‘RTI’) Act . While doing so, it emphasised that it will not permit the Act to be abused through the filing of an excessive number of applications (which in the present case was 476).
The High Court said that it would first examine the nature of the applications and hear the case on its merits before deciding whether the order was permissible. In taking such an accommodating stance towards the order, the Karnataka High Court seems to have missed a rather obvious legal position – that the Act vouchsafes no power upon the State or Central Information Commission (‘CIC’) to debar individuals from exercising their right to information.
Unfortunately, this practice of blacklisting individuals on the grounds of alleged misuse of the Act is not unheard of. The first such order was passed as far back as 2010, when the Punjab SIC imposed a one-year ban on an RTI activist from seeking information under the Act. Since then, similar orders have been passed by the SICs of at least four more states – Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka, and Odisha. These orders are generally justified on the ground that the person being debarred has ‘harassed employees’ under the Act, or ‘misused’/‘abused’ the provisions of the Act. This piece contests the validity of this practice. It avers that such orders are ultra vires to the Act and, by extension, the constitutional right to information.
Legal validity of the Orders
The right to information is a fundamental right recognised under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution. The RTI Act is a channelisation of that right into a concrete structure, allowing the smooth flow of public information to those seeking it. Any restriction placed upon the right should be constitutionally permitted and duly enacted by the legislation. Consequently, such limitations cannot stem from executive orders .
Which application(s) should be rejected for apparent misuse? Are all bound to be disposed of down the drain? Or only those where it is evident that the applications constitute misuse?
The Supreme Court has stressed a strict reading of limitations of fundamental rights and mandates that any such limitation must be clearly established by a legislative Act with minimal space for the executive’s discretion (See, for instance, Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015)). Keeping this sacrosanct proposition in mind, the argument is structured in two frames. First, it examines whether resisting information on the grounds of abuse of the Act by filing excessive applications (‘misuse exception’) is permissible. Second, it considers whether any penal consequences—such as a future bar from exercising the right—for such abuse are plausible.
The fanciful exception
The Act enumerates the process, scope, and limitations of the right. Under Section 8 of the Act, Public Authorities are exempted from furnishing information on certain subjects. The provision enumerates ten such subjects. These include information that is related to national security, may jeopardise international relations, is subjudice, involves personal information of third parties, and so on. Nothing even remotely similar to the ‘misuse exception’ finds mention in the Section. That being said, the judiciary has not been entirely averse to such an idea.
A noteworthy example is the Supreme Court’s decision in Indian Soaps & Toiletries Makers Assn. v Ozair Husain (2013), which concerned an appeal against a Delhi High Court decision that had ordered the Union government to ensure that the packaging of every drug explicitly clarifies whether its ingredients are of vegetarian or non-vegetarian origin. The top Court overturned the decision, holding that though there was a right to know, information could be furnished only “to the extent it is available and possible”. The Court exclaimed that otherwise, the various kinds of vegetarians in India (Jains, “eggetarians,” etc.) could also demand information about “the origin of a vegetarian ingredient.” Employing this sort of slippery slope argument, the SC implicitly recognised expediency and potential misuse that may overburden the State as a limitation on the right.
However, this decision does not relate to the Act. It dealt with the extent of the unsolicited and relevant information that must be provided to the general public. The Act, on the other hand, creates a conduit that allows individuals to demand information held by the Public Authorities through a pathway specially dedicated to this purpose. It sets up institutions that ensure dissemination of information without straining either the government or the seeker. Any stoppages in that pathway paved by the Act must be found in the Act itself, and ‘misuse’ as an exception is nowhere mentioned.
Notwithstanding this, the potential for the misuse of the Act has received judicial acknowledgement. In Central Board of Secondary Education v. Aditya Bandopadhyay (2011), the Supreme Court dissuaded citizens from “[i]ndiscriminate and impractical demands”, which “would be counter-productive” and “result in the executive getting bogged down with the non-productive work of collecting and furnishing information.” Overlooking the apathetic attitude of the Court towards the statutory duty of “collecting and furnishing information”, the words posture as paraenesis for proper use, and not law backed by sanctions.
Importantly, there are precedents of denying information on grounds beyond the limits of Section 8. The CIC in Mr Ramesh Chand Jain v. Government of NCT of Delhi (2012) cited the extra-statutory ground of previous conveyance of information to reject the application. This has further been approved by the Delhi High Court in Shishir Chand v. The Central Information Commission (2023) and has since become a recognised exception.
Since then, similar orders have been passed by the SICs of at least four more states – Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka, and Odisha.
Moreover, Section 7(9) of the Act accommodates administrative remedies against excessive or vexatious use, by allowing information that disproportionately diverts resources to be denied. Thus, a most favourable reading of the aforementioned facts, perhaps, may yield the hypothesis that the misuse of the Act by filing an excessive and vexatious number of petitions is a reason for denying information. But even if we were, for argument's sake, to concede this, a subtle difference between other exceptions and the misuse exception obscures the Act’s position.
All exceptions noted above, other than the misuse exception, are based on the substantial nature of the information requested. Therefore, it becomes easy to determine which applications are to be rejected. For instance, any application that seeks information already furnished to the applicant will not be accepted. The misuse exception is based on the seeker’s exploitative behaviour regarding the Act. In such scenarios, it would be difficult to determine which particular application must be rejected. Take, for instance, the Karnataka High Court decision mentioned at the onset. Which application(s) should be rejected for apparent misuse? Are all bound to be disposed of down the drain? Or only those where it is evident that the applications constitute misuse? Moreover, when can we say such abuse has taken place? Is it purely a question of the number of applications within a specific time frame, or something else?
These questions, inter alia, require legislative clarification to satisfy the stringent conditions set out in Shreya Singhal.
In accepting such restrictions, we recognise that rights unaccompanied by accountability can result in disorder.
Penalties
Penalties, however, are even less amenable to such interpretation. As mentioned at the start, no provision empowers the CIC/SIC to pass orders barring individuals from filing subsequent applications as a measure of punishment. The Act, interestingly, does empower the CIC/SIC to impose penalties (public inquiries or fines) on public officers if, while deciding appeals or complaints, it finds that the concerned officer has, without reasonable cause, refused to receive an application, failed to furnish information within the prescribed time, or maliciously denied the request for information (as per Section 20 of the Act).
Importantly, in Mohd. Shakeel Saifi v. PIO (2016), the CIC held that this provision could be invoked to penalise public officers who file malicious applications to harass co-workers. While the CIC insisted that public authorities must be wary of maliciously filed applications from anyone, it attached penal consequences only to those filed by public officers.
This may be an executive overreach. The Act provides for penal consequences only under specific circumstances – i.e., when public officers shirk their statutory duty to furnish information without reasonable cause. In accessing information under the Act, the public officers are akin to every other citizen. Deploying Section 20 in such cases would treat public officers as a separate class of citizens and might very well transgress the principle of intelligible differentia under Article 14. This question, however, remains outside the scope of this piece.
On barring citizens from filing future applications, the Delhi High Court’s judgment in Shishir Chand is of much relevance. In that case, a citizen had filed multiple applications for information already provided to them, and, as a riposte, the SIC of the State barred them from filing any future application on the subject. The High Court overturned the sanction, asserting that CIC/SICs cannot ban citizens’ future exercising of their right. They may reject particular applications if they fall under the exceptions catalogued in the Act (including when the information has already been provided), but they cannot impose overarching bans on citizens' right to information.
Such orders allow the CIC/SICs to impose blanket bans on citizens’ right to information without any credible and clear criteria. The very determination of what constitutes ‘abuse’ is replete with vagueness. The absence of any clear statutory standard leaves such assessments open to subjective interpretation and arbitrary application, and chips away at the decision in Shreya Singhal. This is a paradigmatic example of executive overreach. In this case, the ‘misuse exception’, merely for rejecting applications, let alone orders inflicting blanket bans, ought to emerge from legislative Acts.
Conclusion
Penalties aimed at preventing the misuse of fundamental rights are not unprecedented. Courts occasionally issue gag orders, and statutes criminalise defamation or speech that offends religious sentiments. In accepting such restrictions, we recognise that rights unaccompanied by accountability can result in disorder. Yet, the Constitution accords fundamental rights a sanctity that shields them from the whims of executive convenience.
Orders blacklisting individuals from filing RTI applications—whether temporary or permanent—represent precisely that: an assertion of administrative ease over constitutional principle. If ‘misuse’ of the Act is indeed a genuine concern, the remedy lies in prompt legislative intervention, not in ultra vires executive sanctions.