Press Council of India’s Contribution to the RTI Act

Long before the Right to Information Act became a household acronym in India, a quiet but determined effort was underway inside the Press Council of India (PCI) to transform citizen access to information from a privilege into a legal right. While grassroots movements like the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) in Rajasthan are rightly celebrated as the backbone of the RTI movement, the PCI provided the intellectual and legal scaffolding that turned a people’s demand into a drafted, debatable piece of legislation. Understanding this role is essential to understanding why the RTI Act, 2005 took the shape it did.

The Press Council of India: A watchdog with a larger vision 🔗

The Press Council of India is a statutory, quasi-judicial body re-established in 1979 under the Press Council Act, 1978, with the mandate of preserving press freedom and improving the standards of newspapers and news agencies. Traditionally headed by a retired Supreme Court judge, it sits at a unique intersection of journalism, law, and public interest. That positioning made it a natural forum to think seriously about a citizen’s right to information – because journalists, more than almost anyone else, understood the cost of bureaucratic secrecy.

During the 1990s, the PCI moved beyond its traditional role of adjudicating press-related complaints. Under the leadership of Justice P.B. Sawant, who served as chairman between 1995 and 2001, it took on the unusual task of actively shaping public policy on transparency. This was a deliberate choice. A press that cannot access government records cannot hold power accountable, and the PCI recognised that press freedom is hollow without an enforceable right to information.

The 1996 draft: India’s first serious blueprint for RTI 🔗

The turning point came on 30 September 1996, when Justice P.B. Sawant, then Chairperson of the Press Council of India, publicly released a slim draft of the RTI Bill at a press conference in New Delhi. This was not merely a policy paper – it was the first major, comprehensive draft legislation on the right to information in independent India.

The draft was remarkable for its ambition. It affirmed the right of every citizen to seek information from any public body, and crucially, the term “public body” was defined to include not just the State but also privately-owned undertakings, non-statutory authorities, companies, and other entities whose activities affect the public interest. This was a striking expansion of the conventional understanding of transparency, which usually stopped at the boundary of government offices.

The 1996 PCI draft was later refined and reissued as the PCI-NIRD Freedom of Information Bill, 1997, after being updated in collaboration with the National Institute of Rural Development. Even though this draft was not directly enacted, it became the intellectual reference point for every subsequent attempt at RTI legislation in India.

Why 1996 mattered 🔗

To appreciate the significance of the PCI’s draft, consider the landscape of the time. The Official Secrets Act, 1923, a colonial-era statute, still dominated the information regime and prohibited public servants from sharing almost any official document. Information disclosure in India had traditionally been restricted by the Official Secrets Act, 1923 and various other special laws, which meant the culture of governance was fundamentally one of secrecy. The PCI’s draft directly challenged that culture by framing information as a citizen’s entitlement, not a bureaucrat’s discretion.

Justice P.B. Sawant: The legal mind behind the draft 🔗

No account of the PCI’s contribution is complete without centring Justice P.B. Sawant. A former Supreme Court judge and a constitutional thinker, he brought rare legal rigour to the drafting process. According to Nikhil Dey, founder member of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), Justice Sawant took immense efforts to draft the law and took inputs from NCPRI, which was then the only NGO campaigning for the RTI Act, before circulating the draft to MPs and Chief Ministers of all states.

The process was strikingly consultative. Justice Sawant himself recalled that he first convened a conference of senior journalists, lawyers, and judges, prepared a draft, and then sent it to the broadcasting ministry during I.K. Gujral’s tenure as Prime Minister. This approach – bringing together the media, the legal fraternity, and civil society before approaching the government – set a template for how RTI advocacy would unfold over the next decade.

Seminars, workshops, and the building of public opinion 🔗

The PCI did not treat drafting as a one-off event. It organised seminars and workshops across the country to build consensus around the idea of a statutory right to information. A pivotal early gathering was the 1995 meeting of social activists at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie, where an initial draft was formulated. Subsequent workshops helped refine the language and build a coalition of journalists, lawyers, and activists who could lobby sustainedly for the law.

These consultations were more than academic exercises. They gave the RTI idea institutional legitimacy at a time when the government was reluctant to move on transparency reforms. By hosting and convening, the PCI ensured that the demand for RTI was not dismissed as a fringe activist cause.

Linking press freedom with the right to information 🔗

One of the PCI’s most important intellectual contributions was framing the right to information as inseparable from press freedom. Investigative journalism, by its very nature, depends on access to documents, files, tenders, and decisions that governments would prefer to keep hidden. Without a legal right to information, even the most committed journalist is reduced to relying on leaks and anonymous sources.

This framing had constitutional roots. The Supreme Court had already expanded the interpretation of Article 19(1)(a) to include the right to know, and the PCI built on this jurisprudence. Justice Sawant was also one of the judges in the landmark 1995 Supreme Court ruling that airwaves are public property and rejected the state monopoly on airwaves, a decision that philosophically aligned with his RTI advocacy. The same logic – that information and communication channels belong to the people, not the state – ran through both.

A tool for investigative journalism 🔗

The PCI’s advocacy repeatedly emphasised that a robust RTI regime would transform Indian journalism from allegation-driven reporting to document-based, evidence-rich storytelling. Once the Act was eventually passed, this prediction bore out. RTI applications have been used to expose scams, question public expenditure, and scrutinise appointments – stories that would have been impossible in the pre-2005 information regime.

From the PCI draft to the RTI Act, 2005 🔗

The journey from the 1996 PCI draft to the eventual enactment of the RTI Act was long and, at times, frustrating. A working group under the chairmanship of H.D. Shourie was set up by the Central Government to prepare draft legislation on freedom of information, and its report and draft law were published in 1997, later becoming the basis for the Freedom of Information Bill, 2000.

That Bill eventually became the Freedom of Information Act, 2002 – but it was never notified, and its provisions were widely considered weak. The PCI’s original, more expansive draft continued to inform civil society’s critique of the FOI Act and the demand for stronger legislation.

The final enactment 🔗

The decisive push came with the formation of the National Advisory Council (NAC) in 2004 under the UPA government. After years of lobbying and protests, Parliament passed the RTI Act in 2005, and it came into force on 12 October 2005, with the first application filed under the law in Pune by Shahid Raza Burney. The eventual law, though shaped by multiple drafts and committees, carried clear genetic traces of the PCI’s 1996 effort – especially in its broad definition of public authorities and its emphasis on citizen access as a default rather than an exception.

The enduring significance of the PCI’s contribution 🔗

Several threads make the PCI’s role historically distinctive. First, it was an institutional intervention. While civil society movements provided moral and political energy, the PCI provided institutional weight. A draft circulated by a statutory body carried a credibility that purely activist drafts could not match.

Second, the PCI’s work was legally sophisticated. Justice Sawant and his collaborators understood that good intentions are not enough – a law must survive parliamentary debate, judicial scrutiny, and bureaucratic implementation. The 1996 draft anticipated many of the exemptions, procedures, and appellate mechanisms that later appeared in the RTI Act.

Third, the PCI’s advocacy connected the citizen’s right to know with the press’s duty to inform. This dual framing gave the RTI movement a broader base of support, drawing in editors, reporters, and media organisations who might otherwise have stayed on the sidelines.

A model of institutional public service 🔗

The PCI’s contribution also stands as a rare example of a regulatory body going beyond its mandate in the public interest. Most statutory bodies are content to administer their specific legislation. The PCI, under Justice Sawant, took on the larger cause of democratic transparency – a reminder that institutions, when led by people of conviction, can shape history far beyond their formal jurisdiction.

What do you think? If the Press Council of India had not stepped in with its 1996 draft and sustained advocacy, how much longer might India have waited for a comprehensive Right to Information law? And in an era where digital platforms and AI-generated content are reshaping journalism, does the PCI – whose jurisdiction still does not extend to television, OTT, or social media – need a similar reinvention today?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Council_of_India
2. https://www.thinkpragati.com/bookshelf/4422/power-to-the-people/
3. https://www.legalserviceindia.com/article/l88-Right-To-Information.html
4. https://www.humanrightsinitiative.org/content/national-level-rti
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Information_Act,_2005
6. https://www.moneylife.in/article/late-justice-pb-sawant-played-a-stellar-role-in-drafting-and-campaigning-for-the-rti-act-in-india/62967.html
7. https://caravanmagazine.in/interview/today-all-institutions-are-being-run-according-to-individual-whims-justice-pb-sawant
8. https://pskpedia.com/history-of-rti-act-2005-in-india-evolution-and-challenges/
9. https://www.newsclick.in/A-Life-Purpose-Remembering-Former-Justice-PB-Sawant
10. https://iasexamportal.com/courses/gs-concepts/indian-polity/right-information
11. https://pwonlyias.com/current-affairs/rti-shift-to-a-right-to-deny-information/