SSC Typing Practice Passage: The Right to Information Act, 2005

The Right to Information Act, 2005, gave every citizen of India a simple but powerful tool: the right to ask a public authority for information and to receive an answer within a fixed time. Before the Act, files in government offices were usually treated as confidential, and an ordinary person had little chance of finding out why an application was pending or how public money had been spent. The Act came into force on 12 October 2005, and within a few years it had changed the relationship between citizens and the administration.

The procedure is deliberately easy. A citizen writes an application to the Public Information Officer of the department concerned, pays a small fee and does not have to give any reason for asking. The officer must reply within 30 days. If the information concerns the life or liberty of a person, it must be supplied within 48 hours. If the reply is not satisfactory, the applicant can file a first appeal within the department and, after that, a second appeal before the Central or State Information Commission.

The Act has been used in thousands of ways. Villagers have asked for the muster rolls of rural works and discovered names of people who had never worked on the site. Students have obtained copies of their evaluated answer sheets. Pensioners have learned why their payments were delayed. In many cases, the mere filing of an application was enough to make an office act on a file that had been gathering dust for months.

The law also places a duty on public authorities to publish basic information on their own, without waiting for a request. This includes the functions of each office, the names of officers, the budget allotted and the norms followed for decisions. When this proactive disclosure is done well, the number of applications falls, because citizens can find what they need on a website or a notice board.

Some information is exempt, such as matters that would affect the security of the country or the privacy of an individual. Even so, the central idea of the Act is clear. In a democracy, information held by the government belongs to the people, and an informed citizen is the best guard against waste and delay.