Narendra Modi may be the only Prime Minister of India who has not created a single institution. Instead, all he inherited is facing an existential threat. In this regard, the Right to Information Act is a stellar example. It began as a simple promise with a big purpose: Any citizen could demand public records accessible to the Parliament and get answers within clear timelines. It shifted the burden of proof to the state, making governance more open and transparent. The law was used by ordinary people to correct ration cards, restart pensions, recover unpaid wages, or check beneficiary lists. Its strength lay in its speed, cost effectiveness, and fear of penalties among officials tempted to delay or deny information.But today, that promise has been hollowed out. On paper, RTI survives, but in practice, the Modi government seems to have dismantled the machinery of this revolutionary idea that made the powerful accountable to the powerless, by law.AdvertisementTo begin with, the RTI law has been weakened as the space for disclosure has been radically reduced. Section 8 of the RTI law was already used to refuse records as “personal”, “commercial”, or “under-investigation”. Even then, personal information under Section 8(1)(j) could be withheld only after tests about public activity, public interest and unwarranted privacy harm, with a public-interest override in place. In August 2023, Parliament passed the Digital Personal Data Protection Act and amended RTI Section 8(1)(j). The amendment broadened “personal information” as a ground for refusal and deleted the safeguard that made information available to Parliamentarians also available to citizens. Summarily, this makes it easier to shut files by calling a routine administrative details “personal”. With this, citizens lost their access to crucial documents — the trail of decisions, postings, expenditures, conflicts of interest, and beneficiary lists.Even with this leftover law, there are questions over effectiveness owing to huge vacancies. Across the country, Information Commissions are ghost offices — no chiefs, no commissioners, no hearings taking place. According to the “Report Card of Information Commissions in India 2023-24,” released by the Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS) between July 2023 and June 2024, seven commissions went completely defunct. Maharashtra operated with five commissioners while six posts, including the Chief’s, lay vacant. By September 2025, the Central Information Commission was headless again, down to just two commissioners. The system that once put fear in corrupt officers now runs on empty chairs and missing signatures.Beyond the vacancies, the representational character of the commissions has also been altered. The Act envisioned individuals of eminence across law, science and technology, social service, management, journalism, mass media, administration, and governance to administer the law, giving it an operational distance from the government. But today, the BJP appoints people of their choice to the commissions — mostly retired bureaucrats who comprise 57 per cent of commissioners and 85 per cent of chiefs. Journalism, law, academia, and civil society are thinly represented. Gender diversity is worse. Since 2005, only 9 per cent of commissioners and just 5 per cent of chiefs have been women, and as of October 2025, not one commission was headed by a woman.AdvertisementThe commissions lack autonomy due to executive overreach. In 2019, the government reduced the Commissioner’s fixed terms from five years to three, and reserved the power to relax service conditions. Shorter terms and overarching discretion of the executive render the Commissioners dependent on the very authority they are meant to question.The consequences of these systematic assaults are clearly visible. The Supreme Court had warned that failing to fill vacancies would turn RTI into a dead letter. Today, we are living that warning. As of June 30, 2024, commissions carried 4,05,509 pending appeals and complaints, up from a little over 2,18,000 in 2019. Maharashtra alone sat on nearly 1,10,000 matters, Tamil Nadu on more than 41,000, Chhattisgarh over 25,000, and the Central Information Commission close to 23,000. By September 2025, the number of pendencies in CIC has increased to 26,800.These pendencies have made the system excruciatingly slow. If you filed an appeal on July 1, 2024, your turn would likely come in 5 years and 2 months in Chhattisgarh. In Bihar, 4 years and 6 months. In Odisha, 3 years and 11 months. In Tamil Nadu, 2 years and 5 months. Even at the Central Information Commission, the wait is about 1 year and 4 months. Fourteen commissions would take a year or more to decide a matter.Also Read | Efficacy of RTI Act is threatened by opacity, opposition from bureaucracy and lawmakersEven after this abysmal pace of resolution, real enforcement is missing. Commissions can discipline erring officials through show-cause notices and penalties under Section 20, but the bite is weak. From July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024, across the 18 commissions that tracked this metric, only 4,480 show cause notices were issued; Haryana alone accounted for 3,412. In the same period, 23 commissions imposed penalties in only 3,953 cases. Where both metrics are available, penalties appear in only about three per cent of all cases disposed of in 2023-24. Several large commissions, including the CIC and those in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand, do not even maintain show-cause data. With little risk of sanction, delay and denial flourish.The human cost of this systematic assault on the RTI machinery shows up in the daily experience of ordinary people. In Patiala, Punjab, a resident’s RTI from December 14, 2022, dragged on through multiple hearings without disclosure. The Punjab State Information Commission first issued a show-cause notice (April 24, 2023), then imposed a Rs 25,000 penalty and bailable warrants when the then PIO kept skipping multiple hearings. Upon reallocation, the Commission listed the matter in January 2025, but again, the PIO — previous and current — didn’t comply. The Commission then ordered penalty recovery from the salary, recommended disciplinary proceedings, and gave the present PIO one final opportunity to provide the records by the next date, Oct 14, 2025 — meaning that despite penalties and warrants, nearly three years after the RTI, the applicant still has not received the information.most readThis is the story of many Indians for whom governance has been rendered distant and opaque. The RTI that empowered the marginalised was quick, cheap, and enforceable. Today, citizens can still file applications, but the information is either conveniently denied or the appeal takes years.The unravelling of the RTI is not an isolated event. Parallels can be drawn with the decay of other institutions. At the Election Commission, a 2023 law changed the selection panel for commissioners, shifting the balance towards the executive. At the IIMs, three directors have already resigned since 2021, before the end of their terms, citing administrative overreach. One after the other, institutions are getting dismantled. What remains is not governance through institutions, but governance through control — an inefficient system where loyalty replaces legality, fear stands in for accountability. Not just a bureaucratic decay, it is an assault on the very foundations of our democracy.The writer is chairman, media and publicity department, All India Congress Committee