by Right To Information request about Right To Information request triggers 11th-level bureaucratic recursion
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
India Satirical Journalism: The Right To Ask Why You Can’t Ask
MUMBAI — Prakash Rane, 41, accountant, activist, and holder of what he believes is the world record for RTI applications filed from a single address in Dharavi, has achieved what he describes as “the ultimate administrative zen” by filing an RTI application asking the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai to explain why his previous RTI application was rejected, a rejection that cited Section 8(1)(j) (information that would cause “unwarranted invasion of privacy”), applied, somewhat creatively, to his query about the number of potholes repaired on LBS Road last monsoon season.
“Potholes,” Prakash told our correspondent, “do not have privacy rights. They are holes in the road. They are, by definition, in the public domain. Anyone can see them. I could have sent a child with a pencil to count them. Instead I filed an RTI because I thought it would be faster. I now believe I was wrong. I have filed an RTI about the RTI. I expect to file an RTI about that RTI. I am beginning to understand that the destination is not the point. The RTI is the journey.” He has been studying Buddhist philosophy since the third rejection.
The RTI: India’s Most Optimistic Law
The Right to Information Act 2005 is one of independent India’s most significant democratic achievements — a law that formally established citizens’ right to demand transparency from government institutions and that has, in the two decades since its passage, empowered thousands of activists, journalists, and ordinary citizens to expose corruption, inefficiency, and the creative interpretation of “information” that government bodies are willing to share versus information they prefer to describe as private, sensitive, or “not available in the requested format.”
Transparency advocates interviewed by the BBC note that the RTI Act has produced genuine accountability in thousands of cases — land records revealed, corruption documented, schemes exposed as fictional — alongside a parallel universe of strategic rejection, delayed responses, missing files, and transferred officers who take institutional memory with them to their new postings, leaving applicants to restart the process with someone new who is very sorry but has no knowledge of the previous correspondence.
The Rejection: Creative Interpretation As Art Form
The grounds on which RTI applications can be rejected are defined in the Act and are, in principle, limited. In practice, they have proven elastic. Applications have been rejected for: being “too broad,” being “too specific,” involving information “not held in the office,” involving information “held in a different format,” being submitted on the wrong colour paper (one documented case, Maharashtra, 2018), and, most creatively, being about a subject that the Public Information Officer considered “not of public interest,” which is a determination that the PIO is not actually empowered to make but made anyway, confident that most applicants will not know this and even fewer will appeal.
Prakash Rane knows this. He has a printed copy of the RTI Act with his own annotations. He appeals every rejection. His appeals sometimes succeed. His successful appeals sometimes produce information that confirms the thing he suspected, which is satisfying but not resolvable, and sometimes produce information that reveals something worse than what he suspected, which is also satisfying and also not resolvable, and this is, he has concluded, simply what accountability work looks like from the inside.
The Potholes: Still There
Prakash Rane’s original inquiry was about potholes on LBS Road. By the time his RTI journey reached its current recursive depth, the monsoon in question had ended, a new monsoon had occurred, new potholes had formed, and MCGM had launched a “100-day pothole repair drive” announced on Twitter with before-and-after photographs that several residents identified as the same pothole photographed from different angles. The potholes Prakash had asked about were, as of our correspondent’s visit, still there, which is both a failure of municipal infrastructure and an excellent argument for filing more RTIs.
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