RTI in a revenue office: PIO, appeals and the 30-day clock

Revenue offices are among the heaviest RTI targets anywhere — land records, assignments, enquiry reports, beneficiary lists, and the files of every dispute in the division. The Act’s machinery is stable general knowledge; how it lands on your desk, and how the office around you actually handles it, is the point of this page.

The roles

Every public authority designates Public Information Officers (PIOs) under s. 5 to receive applications and furnish information, and Assistant PIOs (APIOs) at sub-divisional levels to receive and forward applications and appeals. Above the PIO sits the First Appellate Authority (FAA) — an officer senior in rank to the PIO within the same authority. In a typical revenue posting, a superintendent or the office head is PIO and the Deputy Collector — as RDO or as a Collectorate officer — is the FAA. Know which hat your office order gives you; the duties differ sharply. A PIO answers on the record and carries personal penalty exposure; an FAA sits in a quasi-appellate seat and is judged on reasoned orders. One more s. 5 rule with teeth: a PIO may seek the assistance of any other officer, and that officer, for the purposes of any contravention, is treated as a PIO — the section that stops the record-room from shrugging at the PIO’s requisition.

The clock

• 30 days from receipt to supply the information or reject with reasons (s. 7).
• 48 hours where the information concerns the life or liberty of a person.
• +5 days when the application came through an APIO.
• If a fee intimation is sent, the interval between the intimation and payment is excluded from the 30 days.
• Deemed refusal: silence past the deadline is treated as refusal — and information supplied after the deadline must be given free of cost.
• A PIO who receives an application wholly or partly concerning another public authority transfers it under s. 6(3) within five days, informing the applicant.

The clock is the whole game administratively. An office that logs every application in a register on the day of receipt, with a due date, almost never pays penalties; an office that lets applications ride in the tappal does.

Exemptions: ss. 8, 9 and 10

s. 8(1) lists the exemptions: information prejudicial to sovereignty, security or strategic interests; information forbidden by a court; breach of legislative privilege; commercial confidence and trade secrets (8(1)(d)); information held in a fiduciary relationship (8(1)(e)); foreign-government confidence; information endangering life or safety of an informant; information that would impede investigation or prosecution (8(1)(h)); Cabinet papers, until decisions are taken and the matter complete; and personal information with no relationship to public activity or interest, or which would cause unwarranted invasion of privacy (8(1)(j)) — the clause most argued over in revenue offices. Three cross-cutting rules discipline all of them: most s. 8(1) exemptions yield to an overriding public interest in disclosure; information that cannot be denied to Parliament or a State Legislature cannot be denied to an applicant; and much exempt material opens after 20 years. s. 9 separately allows refusal where supplying would infringe a subsisting copyright of a person other than the State. s. 10 allows severance — where only part of a record is exempt, the disclosable part is given, with notice of what was severed and why.

The practical rule for a revenue PIO: the exemption must be cited by clause, and reasoned against the actual record. “Exempt under s. 8” without a clause and a reason is the most commonly reversed endorsement in the system.

Third-party information: s. 11

Where the request touches information supplied by, or relating to, a third party which that party has treated as confidential, the PIO gives the third party written notice within five days of receiving the application; the third party has ten days to make its objection; and the PIO then decides — disclosure follows if the public interest in disclosure outweighs the possible harm to the third party. The decision notice tells the third party of its right to appeal. In land matters this arises constantly: one rival seeking the other’s file.

Penalties and appeals

Under s. 20, the Information Commission can impose on the PIO personally — not on the office — Rs. 250 per day of delay, up to Rs. 25,000, for refusal without reasonable cause, mala fide denial, knowingly incorrect information, destruction of requested records, or obstruction; it can also recommend disciplinary action. The appeal ladder under s. 19: first appeal to the FAA within 30 days of the PIO’s decision or deemed refusal (the FAA disposes of it within 30 days, extendable to 45 for recorded reasons); second appeal to the State Information Commission within 90 days. In any appeal, the burden of justifying the denial is on the PIO.

A worked example: the rival’s assignment file

A mandal office in erstwhile Adilabad. Bhoomaiah and Poshetty are locked in a dispute over an assigned parcel; Bhoomaiah files an RTI application with the Tahsildar’s PIO seeking “the complete assignment file of Poshetty for Sy.No. 142, including his application, enquiry report, income certificate and the assignment order.” Traced end to end:

1. Day 1. The application is registered with a due date; the fee is receipted.
2. Day 3. The PIO sees the file contains third-party material — Poshetty’s income certificate and personal particulars — and issues a s. 11 notice to Poshetty within the five-day window.
3. Day 12. Poshetty objects to everything: “my private file”. The PIO now balances. The assignment order and the enquiry report concern the disposal of government land — a public act with a clear public interest in scrutiny, and the sort of information the legislature could not be denied. The income certificate and bank details are personal information under 8(1)(j) with no additional public-interest yield beyond what the enquiry report already shows.
4. Day 25. Decision: disclose the application, enquiry report and assignment order; sever the income certificate and personal identifiers under s. 10, listing what was severed and the clause relied on. Poshetty is informed of his right to appeal; Bhoomaiah gets his copies on payment of copying charges.
5. The first appeal. Bhoomaiah appeals to the RDO as FAA against the severance. The FAA order — request stated, PIO’s ground stated, finding on 8(1)(j) and the public-interest balance, direction confirmed with reasons — is issued within 30 days. Either side can carry it to the State Information Commission within 90 days; a file this reasoned rarely travels further.

The same application handled badly — sat on for 40 days, then refused wholesale as “personal information” — produces a deemed refusal, free-of-cost supply, an FAA reversal, and a s. 20 notice with the PIO’s name on it.

Edge cases and common mistakes

• “Records not traceable.” This is not an exemption; it is an admission. The honest course is a certified search memo, reconstruction where possible, and — where destruction is suspected after an application — the PIO should remember that destruction of requested records is itself a s. 20 ground and can attract prosecution under records-law.
• The 8(1)(h) reflex. “Enquiry is pending” does not by itself exempt; the PIO must show disclosure would actually impede the process. A concluded enquiry’s report loses even that.
• The fiduciary stretch. 8(1)(e) covers relationships of trust — it is routinely over-claimed for ordinary official records, and routinely rejected on appeal.
• Missing the s. 11 window. Disclosing third-party material without notice creates a grievance that outlasts the application; discovering the third-party angle on day 28 wrecks the clock. Screen for third parties on day one.
• Opinion-seeking and roving applications. The Act obliges supply of information held on record — not answers to “why was I not selected”, not fresh compilations of opinions. Say so precisely, and supply the records that exist.
• The FAA rubber stamp. An FAA order reading “PIO’s reply is in order, appeal dismissed” is the signature of a system the Commission distrusts. State the request, the ground, the finding, the direction, the date.
• Life-and-liberty misuse and real cases both. The 48-hour clause is invoked loosely; most invocations fail the test. But when a genuine one comes — information bearing on a detained or endangered person — the office must actually move in 48 hours, weekend or not.

Questions you’ll actually get

“PIO: the applicant is our regular litigant — he files ten applications a month. Must we answer all of them?” Yes. Motive is irrelevant under the Act and the applicant cannot be asked for reasons. What discipline permits is precision: supply what the record holds, charge copying costs as prescribed, and reject only clause by clause.

“Can he really get Poshetty’s file? Isn’t that private?” He can get the public-act parts — the process by which government land was assigned. The personal particulars are severed. The Act’s architecture is exactly that split.

“We supplied on day 35 — can we still charge copying fees?” No. Beyond the deadline, information goes free of cost. The fee was lost with the clock.

“As FAA, can you order the PIO to pay the penalty?” No — penalty under s. 20 belongs to the Information Commission alone. The FAA corrects the decision and directs disclosure; the Commission punishes the delay.

“The applicant asked for a certified copy of the pahani — is that even RTI?” Records available through the standing certified-copy and Meeseva channels can be pointed to, but pointing is not refusing: if he insists under RTI, the information is supplied under RTI. Never convert a service question into a denial.

Field notes for a probationer

Ask for the office’s RTI register in your first week: pendency against the 30-day clock, and the last three FAA orders. If applications are being answered with “records not traceable”, that is not an RTI problem — it is a record-room problem, and it is now yours. And write your first FAA order slowly, with the section text open: the format you set becomes the office’s template for years.