Evaluating the Performance of State Information Commissions Across India

The Right to Information Act of 2005 is only as strong as the institutions that enforce it. At the state level, that responsibility falls squarely on the State Information Commissions (SICs) – the independent appellate bodies tasked with hearing second appeals, penalising errant officials, and pushing public authorities toward genuine transparency. Two decades in, how are these watchdogs actually performing? The answer is a mixed bag: some SICs are pioneering genuinely creative solutions to make RTI accessible, while others are buckling under vacancies, backlogs, and administrative neglect. Let’s take a closer look at how performance varies across the country and what we can learn from the innovators.

Why appraising SICs matters
Key yardsticks of performance
The troubling common picture
Bright spots: Innovations that are working
Bihar’s JAANKARI: RTI over a phone call
Chhattisgarh: Video conferencing and door-to-door outreach
Sikkim: Documentary films and street plays
Tripura’s TIC Online portal
Other notable efforts
What separates high-performing SICs from the rest?
Persistent gaps that need attention
The road ahead

Why appraising SICs matters

Information Commissions are the final appellate authority under the RTI Act. When a Public Information Officer refuses to share information, when a First Appellate Authority sits on a case, or when a public body simply ignores a query, the SIC is the citizen’s last stop before the courts. Their performance, therefore, is a direct measure of how alive the RTI regime really is in a given state.

Unfortunately, a two-decade review by Satark Nagrik Sangathan shows the functioning of information commissions has become a major bottleneck in the effective implementation of the law. Large backlogs of appeals and complaints in many commissions have resulted in inordinate delays in disposal of cases, rendering the law ineffective. Evaluating SIC performance isn’t just an academic exercise – it directly shapes whether ordinary citizens can actually exercise their fundamental right to know.

Key yardsticks of performance

Any meaningful appraisal of an SIC looks at a cluster of indicators: the number of appeals and complaints registered versus disposed, the pending backlog, the estimated waiting time for a case to be heard, the frequency with which penalties are imposed on defaulting officers, the availability of annual reports, and the overall transparency of the commission’s own functioning. Civil society assessments consistently use these parameters to produce comparative report cards across all 29 information commissions in the country.

The troubling common picture

Before celebrating the innovators, it’s important to acknowledge the systemic weaknesses. Seven out of 29 Information Commissions were found to be non-functional for varying lengths of time in a recent review period, with all posts of commissioners vacant in states like Jharkhand, Tripura, Goa, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. In October 2023, the Supreme Court observed that the failure to fill vacancies risks turning the right to information into a dead letter.

The Tripura experience has been particularly dismal. The Tripura State Information Commission became defunct in July 2021 when the sole commissioner completed his tenure, and it had been defunct three separate times since April 2019. Resource constraints are another persistent theme. A tracking study of eight states found that SICs in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Assam received very poor per capita budgets, which has a direct bearing on their ability to function. Commissions have also been notoriously reluctant to impose penalties on erring officials – a critical power given to them precisely to create deterrence. This pattern, documented in peer-reviewed studies of states like Haryana, risks turning SICs into what one scholar called a “mere scarecrow” rather than an effective regulator.

Bright spots: Innovations that are working

Against this difficult backdrop, several SICs and state governments have experimented with genuinely creative measures to democratise access to RTI. These initiatives deserve close study because they show what is possible when political will meets administrative imagination.

Bihar’s JAANKARI: RTI over a phone call

Perhaps the most celebrated state-level RTI innovation is Bihar’s JAANKARI facilitation centre. Launched in January 2007, JAANKARI uses Information, Communication and Technology to make the RTI Act accessible to common citizens by bridging the literacy and digital divide, and works as a phone-in facility that drafts applications on behalf of callers so that the hassles of physical movement are removed. The Department of Communication allotted the premium-rate number 155311 for filing RTI applications and 155310 as a helpline, making information genuinely a phone call away.

The results have been impressive. According to the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, Bihar was the first state to enable RTI applications by telephone, with call-centre operators drafting applications and forwarding them to the relevant department. Within its first two years of operation, the centre received more than 22,000 calls, including over 7,000 for submitting RTI applications and around 1,400 for filing second appeals before the State Information Commission. The initiative won Bihar the National Award for E-Governance in 2008-09. The system has since evolved; on 1 October 2025 the state officially launched Jaankari 2.0, a major upgrade that integrates the experience for citizens, Public Information Officers, First Appellate Authorities, and Information Commissioners on a single digital platform.

Chhattisgarh: Video conferencing and door-to-door outreach

In a state where citizens are spread across forested and tribal districts, physical travel to the commission headquarters in Raipur is a real barrier. The Chhattisgarh SIC responded by normalising the use of video conferencing for case hearings – appellants in far-flung districts can now depose from their district collectorates rather than travelling hundreds of kilometres. The commission also conducts awareness programmes on RTI implementation aimed at the general public, recognising that technology alone cannot substitute for citizen awareness.

Sikkim: Documentary films and street plays

Sikkim’s SIC has taken a refreshingly cultural approach to awareness. Alongside formal training programmes for PIOs, the commission has produced documentary films and supported street-play (nukkad natak) campaigns to educate citizens about their rights under the Act. This matters especially in a state with dispersed, mountain-terrain communities where print media and internet penetration are uneven. Sikkim is also one of the few states that has historically reported minimal pendency – states like Mizoram, Sikkim and Tripura did not have pending complaints as per October 2014 records , a testament, in part, to proactive outreach and a smaller but responsive administrative setup.

Tripura’s TIC Online portal

The Tripura Information Commission operates the TIC Online portal, which allows citizens to file RTI complaints and second appeals digitally, track their status, and receive notifications. Digitising the front-end of the process is significant because it eliminates the paperwork bottleneck that deters many rural applicants. Of course, an online portal is only as useful as the commission behind it – and Tripura’s repeated spells of defunct status remind us that technology cannot compensate for institutional neglect.

Other notable efforts

Several other states have contributed useful ideas to the larger toolkit. Maharashtra has invested heavily in electronic filing systems for second appeals, producing smoother citizen flow and easier monitoring, as noted in a recent comparative study. Andhra Pradesh, in the earlier years of RTI, was flagged by the PRIA tracking study for taking a proactive role in reviewing public authorities – showing that commendable work is possible even in resource-constrained settings when leadership is engaged. Delhi’s commission has set benchmarks for case throughput per commissioner, with former Central Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi famously disposing of hundreds of cases per month, proving that individual rigour matters as much as systems.

What separates high-performing SICs from the rest?

Patterns emerge when one looks across these innovations. First, leadership and tenure stability are decisive – commissions with full benches and long-serving commissioners consistently outperform those stuck in vacancy cycles. Second, investment in citizen-facing technology – whether that’s Bihar’s phone-in system, Tripura’s online portal, or Chhattisgarh’s video conferencing – dramatically lowers the participation cost for poor and rural applicants. Third, communication and awareness matter enormously; tools like Sikkim’s street plays translate a legalistic Act into something culturally comprehensible. Finally, willingness to penalise defaulters separates paper-tiger commissions from real ones. Where SICs consistently impose the fines provided under Section 20 of the Act, PIO compliance improves measurably.

Persistent gaps that need attention

Even the best-performing SICs face structural constraints that only state governments can resolve. Timely filling of vacancies remains the single biggest determinant of performance – and this is a political choice, not an administrative one. Adequate per-capita budgetary allocation is another. Finally, the push toward Section 4 suo motu disclosure, which requires public authorities to proactively publish categories of information without waiting for applications, remains patchy in most states. A well-implemented Section 4 regime would dramatically reduce the caseload that SICs currently struggle to process.

The road ahead

The appraisal of State Information Commissions yields a simple but important conclusion: the RTI Act succeeds or fails at the state level, and the SICs are central to that verdict. Bihar has shown that technology can democratise a complex legal procedure. Chhattisgarh has shown that geographic distance need not be a barrier. Sikkim has shown that cultural communication deepens engagement. Tripura has shown that a good portal cannot save a non-functional commission. The task now is to scale what works, fix what doesn’t, and hold commissioners accountable not just for disposing cases but for strengthening the culture of openness in governance.

What do you think? Which of these state-level innovations do you believe holds the most promise for replication across India – the phone-based model, the video-conferenced hearing, or the documentary-and-street-play awareness approach? And how much of the variation in SIC performance, in your view, is about resources versus the political commitment of state governments to transparency?

References

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Table of Contents

Why appraising SICs matters 🔗

Key yardsticks of performance 🔗

The troubling common picture 🔗

Bright spots: Innovations that are working 🔗

Bihar’s JAANKARI: RTI over a phone call 🔗

Chhattisgarh: Video conferencing and door-to-door outreach 🔗

Sikkim: Documentary films and street plays 🔗

Tripura’s TIC Online portal 🔗

Other notable efforts 🔗

What separates high-performing SICs from the rest? 🔗

Persistent gaps that need attention 🔗

The road ahead 🔗