The petitioner approached the Regional Provident Fund Commissioner and made\u00a0 an application under the Right to Information Act, 2005 requiring details relating\u00a0 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)\u00a0 was filed before the High Court but the result was\u00a0 \u00a0the same. Thereafter, the petitioner filed a Special leave Petition (SLP) before the Apex Court.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Whether information regarding the respondent\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
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 \u201cpersonal information\u201d, the disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or public interest.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u00a0 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\u00a0 out of CC 14781\/2012 dt. 3-10-2012)<\/p>\n
Editorial <\/em><\/strong>: In Secretary General Supreme Court of India v. Subhash Chandra Agarwal AIR 2010 Del 159 (FB) <\/em><\/strong>the Court held that the notes or jotting by Judges\u00a0 \u00a0or their draft Judgements, they are meant only for the use of judges and cannot\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 be held to bea part of a record \u2018held\u2019 by the public authority.<\/p>\n \u201cA nation\u2019s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n – Mahatma Gandhi<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Right to Information Act, 2005
\nS.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 \u2018Personal Information\u2019 – Information required needs to have some relationship to any public activity or public interest and should justify larger public interest for disclosure \u2013 Held, such information constituted personal information and is exempted from disclosure under S. 8(1)(j) of the Act .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allied-laws"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9S2Rw-3qL","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13192,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13191\/revisions\/13192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}