Section 8 RTI Act exemptions: the 10 grounds, public interest override, and severability test

Section 8(1) of the Right to Information Act 2005 sits at the heart of every RTI rejection. The provision lists ten exempt categories, from sovereignty concerns to fiduciary information, that a Public Information Officer can invoke to refuse disclosure. But the Act does not stop there. Section 8(2) carves out a public interest override and Section 10 mandates partial disclosure where exempt material can be reasonably severed from the remainder. Two Supreme Court decisions, CBSE v. Aditya Bandopadhyay (2011) 8 SCC 497 and Girish R. Deshpande v. Central Information Commission (2013) 1 SCC 212, have reshaped how these exemptions operate in practice. This piece walks through each of the ten grounds, the test the Court has fashioned for invoking 8(1)(e) fiduciary relationships and 8(1)(j) personal information, and what borrowers, taxpayers, and litigants should expect when filing or contesting an RTI in 2026.

The Statutory Question

The Right to Information Act 2005 received Presidential assent on 15 June 2005 and was brought into force on 12 October 2005. The architecture is built on a presumption of openness. Section 3 confers on every citizen the right to information. Section 4(1) requires every public authority to publish 17 categories of information suo motu, including the particulars of its organisation, the powers and duties of its officers, the procedure followed in decision-making and the budget allocated to each agency.

Against this default of disclosure, the legislature inserted three counterweights. Section 8 lists the substantive exemptions. Section 9 permits refusal where disclosure would infringe copyright held by a person other than the State. Section 24 exempts the intelligence and security organisations listed in the Second Schedule, save for information on allegations of corruption and human rights violations.

The question that recurs before the Central Information Commission, the High Courts and the Supreme Court is therefore narrow. When a Public Information Officer refuses information citing one of the ten clauses of Section 8(1), is the refusal sustainable in law? The answer turns on three further questions:

1. Does the information actually fall within the literal scope of the clause invoked?
2. If yes, does Section 8(2) permit disclosure because the public interest in disclosure outweighs the harm to the protected interest?
3. If still no, can the document be partly disclosed under Section 10 by severing the exempt portion?

The Supreme Court has now interpreted each of these questions on more than two dozen occasions. The two judgements that anchor the current law are CBSE v. Aditya Bandopadhyay (2011) 8 SCC 497, which narrowed the meaning of "fiduciary relationship" under Section 8(1)(e), and Girish R. Deshpande v. Central Information Commission (2013) 1 SCC 212, which extended the protection of Section 8(1)(j) to most service records of public servants. Together they define the outer envelope of what a citizen can legitimately demand and what a public authority can legitimately refuse.

What the Court Held

In CBSE v. Aditya Bandopadhyay the question before a two-judge Bench of R. V. Raveendran and A. K. Patnaik JJ was whether a student writing the Class XII board examination could inspect his evaluated answer sheets under the RTI Act. The Central Board of Secondary Education argued that the answer sheets were held in a fiduciary capacity for the examiners and therefore exempt under Section 8(1)(e). The judgement, delivered on 9 August 2011, rejected the broad fiduciary plea and directed disclosure of the answer scripts to the examinee. Three holdings emerged.

First, information held in a fiduciary relationship must arise from a relationship of trust, confidence or special responsibility, not from every situation where one party holds another party's information. Second, the exemption in 8(1)(e) is lifted where the competent authority is satisfied that the larger public interest warrants disclosure, but a student's interest in his own answer sheet did not require the fiduciary plea to be tested because the relationship itself was held not to be fiduciary. Third, Section 22 of the RTI Act overrides inconsistent provisions in any other law, including the examination bye-laws of the Board.

In Girish R. Deshpande the same year the Court took a different turn. The applicant, a citizen of Maharashtra, sought details of postings, transfers, charges of misconduct, gifts received, and income tax returns of a government servant. A two-judge Bench of K. S. Radhakrishnan and Dipak Misra JJ held that this category of personal information, even of a public servant, had "no relationship to any public activity or interest" within the meaning of Section 8(1)(j). It could be disclosed only if the CIC or the State Information Commission recorded a finding that disclosure was justified by larger public interest. The judgement of 3 October 2012 effectively shielded annual confidential reports, asset declarations, income tax returns and disciplinary proceedings of public servants from routine RTI access.

Read together, these two cases set up the analytical framework now followed across the country. Aditya Bandopadhyay pulled the fiduciary exemption towards a tight, common-law definition. Girish Deshpande pushed the personal-information exemption outward to cover a wider class of records held by the State about its employees.

Reasoning

The fiduciary relationship narrowed

The 2011 Bench drew on Words and Phrases (Permanent Edition) and Black's Law Dictionary to fix the meaning of "fiduciary relationship". The relationship, the Court said, requires good faith, candour, loyalty and full disclosure on one side, and trust, reliance and special confidence on the other. The standard examples are trustee and beneficiary, guardian and ward, lawyer and client, doctor and patient, partners inter se, and director and shareholder.

When the CBSE administered an examination, it did not stand in such a relationship with the examiner, the evaluator, or the candidate. The evaluators worked under contractual obligations of confidentiality. The candidates had no claim to confidence; they were the subjects of evaluation, not partners in a fiduciary trust. The Court held that the term in Section 8(1)(e) must be read in this restricted sense. Otherwise every confidential file held by a public authority would be exempt and Section 3 of the Act would be hollowed out.

The narrow reading has since been applied to refuse 8(1)(e) protection to answer scripts, valuation answer keys, internal departmental notes circulated for opinion, and bank inspection reports relied upon by the Reserve Bank of India. The Supreme Court in Reserve Bank of India v. Jayantilal N. Mistry (2016) 3 SCC 525 expressly relied on Aditya Bandopadhyay to hold that the RBI's relationship with regulated banks was statutory and supervisory, not fiduciary, and therefore inspection reports were disclosable.

The public interest override under Section 8(2)

Section 8(2) is the safety valve. It permits disclosure of information exempt under sub-section (1) if "the public interest in disclosure outweighs the harm to the protected interests." The drafting borrows from the United Kingdom Freedom of Information Act 2000 but is more direct because it does not list factors of public interest and leaves the weighing exercise to the deciding authority.

The Court has fashioned a two-step approach. First, the PIO must record the specific harm to the protected interest if disclosure is allowed. Second, the PIO must weigh that harm against the public interest in disclosure, measured by reference to accountability, exposure of wrongdoing, protection of public health and safety, or scrutiny of the use of public funds. A bare assertion that "the file is confidential" or "the matter is sensitive" is not enough. The CIC has the power, and the duty, to remand the matter to the PIO with directions to record reasons in writing.

In Jayantilal N. Mistry the Court applied 8(2) to override even the commercial confidence claim under 8(1)(d), holding that the public interest in transparency of banking supervision outweighed the embarrassment to individual regulated entities. The same reasoning has since been extended to inspection reports of the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India.

Severability under Section 10

Section 10(1) requires the PIO to give "access to that part of the record which does not contain any information which is exempt from disclosure under this Act and which can reasonably be severed from any part that contains exempt information." Section 10(2) further requires the PIO to inform the applicant of the parts severed, the relevant exemption clause, the name and designation of the deciding officer, and the right of appeal.

The provision is mandatory, not directory. The CIC and the High Courts have repeatedly remanded matters where the PIO refused the entire record because some part was exempt. The accepted practice is to redact names of third parties under 8(1)(j) while disclosing the substantive decision, or to provide minutes of a meeting after removing personally identifiable references. The Delhi High Court in UPSC v. Angesh Kumar (2018) 4 SCC 530, while addressing a different issue on cut-off marks, reiterated that Section 10 must be exhausted before the entire record is denied.

The table below summarises the ten grounds.

Five of the ten clauses operate as absolute bars; the remaining five are conditional and yield to a recorded public interest finding. The drafting tracks the recommendations of the H. D. Shourie Working Group of 1997 and the Press Council of India's 1996 draft Bill, both of which preceded the Freedom of Information Act 2002 that the 2005 Act eventually replaced.

Practical Takeaways

For citizens and professionals filing or contesting an RTI, the doctrine of the last two decades can be reduced to working rules. The takeaways differ for the four constituencies that file most RTIs: borrowers and consumers, taxpayers, investors and NRIs, and litigants.

For borrowers and consumers

• A bank's internal inspection report on a borrower's account is not protected by fiduciary doctrine after Jayantilal N. Mistry. If you are negotiating a settlement on a non-performing asset, an RTI to the Reserve Bank of India can yield supervisory observations on the borrower-bank relationship. For an overview of the underlying recovery process, see our note on Section 14 SARFAESI possession proceedings and the doctrinal context on the SARFAESI Act.
• Credit information reports filed with credit bureaus are personal data. Only the subject can demand them under the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act 2005, not by RTI from a third party.
• A wilful defaulter declaration under the RBI Master Direction of 30 July 2024 is a public act of the bank, recorded in board minutes, and is disclosable on RTI. See our explainer on the wilful defaulter framework.
• Recovery proceedings before the Debts Recovery Tribunal are public records, subject to redaction of personal account particulars under Section 10.

For taxpayers

• Income tax assessment files of a third party are protected by Section 8(1)(j) following Girish R. Deshpande. You cannot RTI another taxpayer's ITR.
• Your own assessment file is disclosable to you on request to your jurisdictional Principal Commissioner. You do not need RTI to obtain it but RTI provides a statutory route with a 30-day timeline if the assessing officer is unresponsive.
• Departmental instructions, circulars and standing orders are mandatorily published under Section 4(1)(b) and Section 4(1)(c) of the RTI Act. If a CBDT circular is not on the income tax department's website, that itself is a failure of suo motu disclosure.

For investors and NRIs

• SEBI inspection reports on listed companies are disclosable subject to redaction of unpublished price-sensitive information under 8(1)(d).
• For NRIs verifying property and tax records of relatives in India, an RTI to the local sub-registrar yields property registration data within 30 days. Use our NRI tax calculator to size the resident-versus-NRI tax position before filing.
• Repatriation-related approvals from the authorised dealer bank are commercial documents. The customer copy is available on demand, and an RTI to the RBI may yield the standing policy. Our repatriation calculator covers the LRS and NRO ceilings to help you size the request.

For litigants

• Information forbidden by a court order, including sealed cover material and in-camera records, is exempt under 8(1)(b).
• Information that would impede an ongoing investigation under the Criminal Procedure Code, the Prevention of Money Laundering Act 2002 or the Companies Act 2013 is exempt under 8(1)(h) until the investigation closes or the chargesheet is filed.
• Cabinet papers are exempt under 8(1)(i) but the proviso compels disclosure of decisions and reasons after the matter is complete. The Supreme Court has, on several occasions, directed release of Cabinet notes after the underlying policy decision was taken. For the related context on insolvency Code disqualifications, see our piece on Section 11 IBC disqualified applicants.

A useful procedural summary for the RTI clock:

The penalty under Section 20 is Rs 250 per day of delay, subject to a cap of Rs 25,000 per request. Compensation under Section 19(8)(b) is not capped and depends on the loss caused to the applicant.

FAQ

Can a third party block disclosure of information that concerns them?

Yes. Section 11 of the RTI Act provides a third-party procedure. Where the PIO intends to disclose information that relates to or has been supplied by a third party, the PIO must give written notice within 5 days of the request. The third party has 10 days to make representations. The PIO must decide the request within 40 days of receipt. The third party can appeal to the FAA and then to the CIC within the standard timelines. The override is again the public interest under the proviso to Section 11(1).

Are the answer sheets of a public examination always disclosable?

Yes for most boards and universities after CBSE v. Aditya Bandopadhyay (2011) 8 SCC 497, subject to the rules of the examining body on inspection fees and timing. The Supreme Court extended the principle to ICAI examinations in Institute of Chartered Accountants of India v. Shaunak H. Satya (2011) 8 SCC 781, with the caveat that material that would identify examiners or compromise the evaluation system, such as model answers and instructions to evaluators, may be withheld under 8(1)(d) or 8(1)(e).

Can I file an RTI to obtain the file notings on my own grievance?

Yes. File notings are part of the public record and are not separately exempt. The Department of Personnel and Training clarified by Office Memorandum dated 23 June 2009 that all file notings are accessible under the RTI Act. Exempt portions, such as third-party identifiers or 8(1)(h) investigation references, can be redacted under Section 10 while the substantive notings are disclosed.

What is the position on income tax returns of a public servant?

After Girish R. Deshpande v. CIC (2013) 1 SCC 212, the ITRs and asset declarations of a public servant are personal information under Section 8(1)(j) and are not disclosable absent a recorded finding of larger public interest. The CIC has since refused such requests routinely. Disclosure has been ordered where the applicant has shown a specific allegation of disproportionate assets, but a fishing inquiry is not enough.

Does the RTI Act apply to private companies?

The Act applies to "public authorities" as defined in Section 2(h). A private company is covered only if it is a body owned, controlled or substantially financed, directly or indirectly, by appropriations from a government source, or if it is a non-government organisation that is similarly funded. The Supreme Court in Thalappalam Service Cooperative Bank v. State of Kerala (2013) 16 SCC 82 held that mere government regulation is not enough; the financing must be substantial in the context of the entity's overall resources.

Is the office of the Chief Justice of India covered?

Yes. The Supreme Court in CPIO, Supreme Court of India v. Subhash Chandra Agarwal (2020) 5 SCC 481 held that the office of the Chief Justice of India is a public authority within Section 2(h). Asset declarations of judges are disclosable subject to the public interest test under Section 8(1)(j) and the third-party procedure under Section 11. The judgement of 13 November 2019 brought the higher judiciary's administrative side firmly within the RTI Act.

Can intelligence agencies be RTI'd?

Section 24 of the RTI Act exempts the organisations listed in the Second Schedule, including the Intelligence Bureau, the Research and Analysis Wing, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, the Central Economic Intelligence Bureau and the Enforcement Directorate. But the proviso to Section 24(1) carves out information relating to allegations of corruption and human rights violations. For human rights matters, the CIC must approve disclosure within 45 days; for corruption matters, no such gatekeeping applies and the information must be released subject to the other exemptions in Section 8.