2009 (11) TMI 996

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....ich he had inspected on 05.05.2009. According to the First Appellate Authority, RTI Act did not provide for giving copies of documents identified by the petitioner in course of an inspection of records and that providing copies needed a fresh RTI-application. 3. I find the position taken by the respondents entirely untenable. In the Right to Information Act (Section 2(j)) 'right to information' has been described as information accessible under this Act and included severely inspection, taking notes, extracts and certified copies, records, etc. These descriptions are not mutually exclusive. For example, it is not necessary that a petitioner who asks for inspection of records should be allowed only to inspect records and in order ....

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....)(i) of the RTI Act, a CPIO is required to give to an information-seeker 'reasons' for declining the information under Sections 8 and 9 of the RTI Act. Although Section 7(8)(i) is specific about reasons to be furnished for declining information through Sections 8 and 9, in my view, the requirement of furnishing reasons for denial of information should also apply to other Sections in the Act, such as Section 11(1). It needs to be noted that denial of information is possible also under Section 11(1) ⎯ apart from Sections 8 and 9 ⎯ in respect of confidential information relating to third-parties in case the public interest in such disclosure did not outweigh in importance any possible harm or injury to the interest of the t....

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....an RTI-petitioner ⎯ on the RTI-petitioner's demand ⎯ the submission (written or oral) made by the third-party would not cause any harm to the third-party. 11. It follows from it that, (a) A CPIO acting under Section 11(1) will need to give reasons for his decision, either in favour of disclosing or in favour of not disclosing any given third-party information. (b) Those reasons should be based upon an analysis of the third-party's submission. (c) In case CPIO decides not to disclose a third-party information, ordinarily, the averments of the third-party should be made available to the RTI-petitioner. (d) The CPIO is not obliged to ask for the comments of the RTI-petitioner on the av....