From Transparency to Accountability in the country, The Evolving Jurisprudence of the Right to Information in India

Abstract India kept the Official Secrets Act, 1923, for fifty-eight years after the British left from the country. Under it a clerk who showed a file to a villager could be prosecuted, and the villager had no way of asking for it. The Right to Information Act, 2005, reversed that arrangement, disclosure became the rule, refusal the exception, and an ordinary citizen was given a legal claim on the records of the State. This paper traces how that happened, through the Supreme Court's ruling in Raj Narain and the Rajasthan movement that turned the principle into a political demand, and then asks what has become of the Act. Courts have pulled it both ways, widening it to reach the office of the Chief Justice and the Reserve Bank, narrowing it by treating the conduct of public servants as private. Parliament has moved one way only, and in November 2025 the personal information exemption was rewritten through a data protection statute now before a five-judge Bench. The paper argues that the Act has not been repealed so much as chipped away, and that its recovery depends on a balancing method the Court has already worked out.