In a significant procedural and substantive challenge concerning the boundaries of the Right to Information Act, the Bombay High Court stepped in to address a serious lapse by the State Information Commission, Aurangabad, after it directed the disclosure of a serving police officer's complete service record, without hearing the officer himself and without determining whether any genuine public interest justified overriding his right to privacy.
The controversy began when an individual with no apparent personal or caste-based connection to the petitioner filed an RTI application seeking access to the full service record of the petitioner, who had risen from Police Sub-Inspector to Deputy Superintendent of Police at the Anti-Corruption Bureau, Latur. The applicant's stated rationale was suspicion, he alleged that the officer may have secured his government appointment on the strength of a fraudulent tribe validity certificate, thereby allegedly depriving genuine Scheduled Caste candidates of their rightful opportunity. Both the Information Officer and the First Appellate Authority rejected the application, finding no basis to override the privacy exemption.
However, the Second Appellate Authority, the State Information Commission, reversed those findings and directed disclosure. Counsel for the petitioner argued strenuously before the High Court that this reversal was doubly flawed: first, service records constitute personal information explicitly exempted under Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act; and second, the Commission had never issued notice to the officer or afforded him any opportunity to be heard, in direct violation of the mandatory third-party procedure under Section 11 of the Act.
The Court found both grounds well-founded and decisive. Anchoring its reasoning in the Supreme Court's ruling in Girish Ramchandra Deshpande v. Central Information Commissioner, the bench reaffirmed that an employee's service record, covering performance, disciplinary history, and employment details, is fundamentally a matter between the individual and the employer, and falls squarely within the definition of personal information whose disclosure would constitute an unwarranted invasion of privacy. Critically, the judge held that before any such information could be directed to be disclosed, the Commission was duty-bound to independently satisfy itself that a larger public interest demanded it, a determination it never made.
Compounding this, the Commission had passed its order without once notifying the officer, in plain breach of Section 11. Citing Skill Infrastructure Pvt. Ltd. v. State Information Commissioner, the Court observed that "any order passed by a quasi-judicial authority affecting the rights of a third party could not have been passed without such third party being a party in the proceedings...and/or without being given a reasonable opportunity."
Consequently, the impugned order of the State Information Commission was quashed and set aside, and the writ petition was allowed in full.
Case Title: Narsing Ganpatrao Ankushkar Vs. Balaji Pandharinath Thorat & Ors.
Case No.: 945 Writ Petition No. 4075 of 2015
Coram: Hon’ble Mr. Justice Abasaheb D. Shinde
Advocate for the Petitioner: Adv. Aditya G. Chavan, Adv. Khandare N.B.
Advocate for the Respondent: AGP G.A. Kulkarni, Adv. Suryawanshi G.G.
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