Many beaurocrats complain today, that like any other law in India, the RTI Act is also getting misused. Below is an excellently put argument on this topic by the NCPRI in a presentation made before the Parliamentary Committee:

Our study suggests, by extrapolation, that from October 2005 until October 2008, nearly five lakh RTI applications have been filed in rural areas. The number in urban areas is perhaps double this.

Delhi itself has nearly eighty thousand applications filed in the last three years.

Despite an extensive survey, no evidence has emerged on the misuse of the RTI act. There are instances where RTI applications are vague or requisition vast amounts of information; however, these are adequately covered under the law. In fact, it is not clear how the RTI act can be misused for it only gives access to the truth and how can the truth be misused?

There are two types of apprehensions, one that officers will be blackmailed and the other that they will be harassed because of too many applications. As far as the first apprehension goes, you can only be blackmailed if you have done something wrong. Therefore, rather than demanding that information should not be shared because wrong acts have been committed, it would be better to stop doing wrong things because information will be shared.

Besides, one way of preventing the use of information accessed through the RTI Act to blackmail officials is to put up copy of the application and of the response on the website (except in those few cases where privacy is involved). Once this information is in the public domain, there would be no scope of blackmail.

Few departments receive a large number of applications. Our survey looked at over three hundred departments across the country and at differing levels. The data that emerges suggests that in almost all these departments, a public information officer does not spend more than one or two hours a week (average of between 12 and 24 minutes per working day) on RTI related work.

In any case, even those few public authorities where there is greater pressure, the department can make things much easier for itself if it periodically assess the type of information the citizens want, and put this suo moto in the public domain, as required under Section 4 of the RTI act.