RTI Act Amendments 2019: How Modi’s Government Changed India’s Transparency Law

The Right to Information Act, passed in 2005, gave Indian citizens a legal mechanism to demand information from government bodies, widely regarded as one of the country’s most significant transparency reforms. In 2019, Modi’s government passed amendments to the Act that changed a specific but consequential part of how it operates. This article explains what changed and the debate it triggered.

What the Original Act Guaranteed

Before the 2019 amendment, the tenure, salary, and service conditions of the Chief Information Commissioner and Information Commissioners, both at the central and state level, were fixed by statute and modelled closely on those of Election Commissioners, a structure specifically designed to give these transparency watchdogs a degree of independence from the government whose actions they might need to scrutinise, according to Drishti IAS’s explainer on the amendment.

What the 2019 Amendment Changed

The RTI Amendment Act, passed in 2019, removed these fixed, statutorily guaranteed terms and gave the central government the power to determine Information Commissioners’ tenure, salary, and service conditions through separate rules, rather than having them fixed directly in law, according to The Wire’s coverage, headlined “Information Commissioners’ Tenures, Salaries Now Firmly in Centre’s Hands.” This meant a body designed specifically to hold government accountable for information disclosure became, in a structural sense, more directly dependent on the government’s own discretion for its members’ basic terms of service.

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The Criticism From Transparency Activists

Civil society groups and RTI activists raised sustained objections to the change. Deccan Herald’s coverage quoted one social activist describing the amendment bill as a “deathblow” to the law’s independence. Scroll.in’s analysis, headlined “RTI amendment doesn’t just hurt transparency – it could undermine other statutory bodies,” argued the change set a concerning precedent that could be extended to other independent regulatory and oversight bodies beyond the Information Commission specifically. Congress members of Parliament challenged the amendment in the Supreme Court, which issued notice to the central government on the matter, according to Deccan Herald’s coverage of that legal challenge.

The Government’s Justification

The government’s stated rationale, according to Drishti IAS’s summary of the parliamentary debate, was that Election Commissioners and Information Commissioners perform fundamentally different constitutional functions, with Election Commissioners holding a specific constitutional status that Information Commissioners, created by ordinary legislation rather than the Constitution itself, do not share, meaning tying the two bodies’ service conditions together in the original 2005 law was, in the government’s framing, a mismatched design that the amendment corrected rather than a deliberate weakening of oversight independence.

Why the Distinction Matters in Practice

Whatever the constitutional merits of the government’s argument, the practical effect of the change is that Information Commissioners’ actual day-to-day independence now depends more directly on rules the central government itself sets and can, in principle, revise, rather than on protections fixed permanently in the original statute, a structural shift that transparency advocates argue makes commissioners more likely to defer to government preferences on contentious information requests, even without any single overtly coercive action being necessary to produce that effect.

The Law School Policy Review’s Broader Framing

Academic legal commentary has situated this amendment within a broader pattern. An analysis published by the Law School Policy Review, titled “Curtailing the Detractors: How the RTI Amendment Act 2019 is a new dawn for freedom’s blackout,” argued the amendment reflected a wider trend of statutory bodies designed for government accountability facing reduced structural independence during this period, a framing that connects this specific law to the broader institutional-independence debate covered in our earlier article on academic assessments of Modi’s leadership.

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How RTI Usage Has Continued Despite the Change

Despite the 2019 amendment’s structural changes, the RTI Act itself has continued to function as an active tool for citizens seeking government information, with applications continuing to be filed in large numbers across central and state government departments each year. This continuity is worth noting alongside the criticism, since the amendment changed the institutional independence of the commissioners overseeing appeals and enforcement rather than eliminating citizens’ basic legal right to request information in the first place, a distinction transparency advocates themselves generally acknowledge even as they maintain the appeals and enforcement mechanism has been meaningfully weakened.

What the Rules Framed Under the Amendment Actually Specified

Following the 2019 amendment’s passage, the government issued specific rules detailing the exact tenure and salary terms for commissioners, analysed in detail by PubAdmin Institute’s explainer on the administrative specifics, which found the rules set commissioners’ tenure at three years or until age 65, whichever comes earlier, terms the government can revise through future rule-making rather than needing fresh parliamentary legislation, a level of ongoing executive discretion over the position’s terms that critics argue is precisely the structural vulnerability the original 2005 law’s fixed statutory protections were designed to prevent.

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Bottom Line

The 2019 RTI amendment removed fixed, statutorily guaranteed tenure and salary protections for Information Commissioners, replacing them with terms the central government sets through its own rules, a change transparency activists have called a serious setback for the law’s independence, while the government has defended it as correcting a mismatched constitutional design, a dispute that remains before the Supreme Court following a challenge from opposition Members of Parliament.

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Abhyudaya Verma