Home › Allied Laws › Girish Ramchandra Deshpande v. Central Information Commissioner & Ors. (2013) 1 SCC 212/MANU/SC/0816/2012

Girish Ramchandra Deshpande v. Central Information Commissioner & Ors. (2013) 1 SCC 212/MANU/SC/0816/2012

Right to Information Act, 2005
S.8(1)(j) :Exemption from disclosure of information -Right to Privacy-Information sought for details such as income tax return, assets and liabilities, gifts accepted, etc which come under the purview of ‘Personal Information’ – Information required needs to have some relationship to any public activity or public interest and should justify larger public interest for disclosure – Held, such information constituted personal information and is exempted from disclosure under S. 8(1)(j) of the Act .

Facts

The petitioner approached the Regional Provident Fund Commissioner and made  an application under the Right to Information Act, 2005 requiring details relating  to an employee employed as an Enforcement Officer in Sub-Regional Office. Copies of appointment order, salary details, copies of memo, show cause notice, censure issued, return of assets and liabilities, details of investment and other related details, item wise and value wise details of gifts accepted, details of movable, immovable properties, complete enquiry proceedings, etc. Aggrieved by the said order, the petitioner appealed to the Central Information Commissioner (CIC). Such information was declared to be personal information and hence exempted from disclosure. An appeal before the high Court and thereafter a Letters Patent Appeal (LPA)  was filed before the High Court but the result was   the same. Thereafter, the petitioner filed a Special leave Petition (SLP) before the Apex Court.

 

Issue

Whether information regarding the respondent’s personal matters pertaining to his service career, details of his assets and liabilities, movable and immovable properties, etc was qualified to be personal information as defined in clause (j) of Section 8(1) of the RTI Act?

 

Views

The performance of an employee/officer in an organization is primarily a matter between the employee and the employer and normally those aspects are governed by the service rules. The information mostly sought for finds a place in the income tax return of the respondent. The aforementioned requirements fall under the expression “personal information”, the disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or public interest.

 

 

Held

The petitioner in the instant case has not made out a bona fide public interest in seeking information; the disclosure of such information would cause unwarranted invasion of privacy of the individual under section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act. The petitioner did not succeed in  establishing and convincing the authorities that the information required is for the larger public interest. That being the fact, the petition was dismissed. (SLP (C) No. 27734 of 2012 (Arising  out of CC 14781/2012 dt. 3-10-2012)

Editorial : In Secretary General Supreme Court of India v. Subhash Chandra Agarwal AIR 2010 Del 159 (FB) the Court held that the notes or jotting by Judges   or their draft Judgements, they are meant only for the use of judges and cannot      be held to bea part of a record ‘held’ by the public authority.

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