Transparency runs into custom error

Earlier this month, the Karnataka Information Commission (KIC) got its first woman Chief Information Commissioner. Now, the state has its full complement of 10-plus-one commissioners to decide disputes under the RTI Act. We also know their names and office locations, but that is nearly all the Commission will tell us about its functioning.

Despite being the primary stakeholders of the transparency regime, we do not know which cases will be taken up for hearing, on which date, and by which information commissioner. At the time of writing, the ‘cause list’ link on the KIC’s website drew a blank when queried about the daily listing of cases for May 2026.

The website is also silent about the KIC’s roster– which departments and public authorities have been assigned to which commissioner for deciding information-related grievances. We can only infer from the ‘contact us’ segment of the website that those stationed in Belagavi and Kalaburagi may be hearing cases from those parts of the state.

Admirably, Karnataka was the first state in the country to establish and populate its Information Commission in 2005, even before the Central Information Commission (CIC) was set up. Its primary job is to entertain citizens’ grievances about the replies of public authorities to their requests for information or even the lack of response. It probes the appeals and complaints of RTI applicants unhappy with the quantity, quality, or correctness of the information supplied by public information officers (PIOs).

Between 2017-18 and 2021-22, KIC disposed of almost 90,000 cases. We do not know what happened later because the Commission has not published its annual reports. What is worse is that the decisions of the information commissioners have become sarkari secrets as most of them are no longer uploaded on the Commission’s website.

Strangely, 30 cases listed for the new state Chief Information Commissioner, for resolution in the month of May, only display the decision to adjourn every matter without any indication about the next date of hearing. Two commissioners are not even listed in the ‘decisions’ section.

Last month, the information commissioner stationed at Kalaburagi claimed that the KIC had disposed of 40,000 cases in one year and that his contribution was resolving almost 1,187 cases within 90 days. A commendable achievement indeed, as several were apparently pending for 5-6 years. At the time of writing, clicking on this commissioner’s ‘date-wise orders’ for May displayed “404 custom error” messages.

If the Commission’s decisions are not publicly accessible, where will appellants and public authorities find precedents to support their contentions during hearings? Cases decided over the last two decades by previous information commissioners have been removed from the website, for reasons best known to the KIC.

Until 2021-22, Karnataka ranked just behind the Union government and Maharashtra in the volume of RTI applications. The departments of rural development, revenue, and urban development, in that order, reported handling more than 60% of the 3.79 lakh RTI applications that year – indicating the popularity of the law in both rural and urban areas. Interestingly, the departments of education, social welfare, food and civil supplies, and women and child welfare, which attract a large number of information requests in other states, did not make it to the top-10 list in Karnataka. In the absence of subsequent annual reports, we know nothing about recent trends.

More than 10% of the RTI applications filed with Karnataka’s top three departments escalated to the first appeals stage in 2021-22. 50% of these matters decided by the appellate authorities ended up at the KIC. This indicates a very high level of dissatisfaction with the performance of those public authorities.

We do not know the current pendency status because the KIC’s website does not display this data, unlike the CIC, which regularly updates pendency figures (36,307 pending cases as of today). The KIC’s mandatory disclosure of basic information, required under Section 4(1)(b) of the Act, is currently stuck in 2022-23, as evidenced by its budgetary data, even though the document is marked ‘2025-26’.

The KIC, like its counterparts elsewhere in the country, is mandated to steer public authorities away from pointless opacity towards purposive transparency that strengthens our democracy. The Commission must practise what it preaches if it intends to remain relevant to the citizenry. The state Chief Information Commissioner must lead from the front.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH)