RTI Reply on a Completed Road Contract
At a Delhi municipal zone office, a junior engineer (JE) is handed a Right to Information (RTI) application received on 3 May. The applicant seeks three sets of records for a road re-carpeting job completed in February: the contractor's running bills, the measurement book entries, and quality-test reports for bitumen and aggregate. Payment was released in March. The contractor has written to the office claiming that the rates and bills are "commercial confidence" and must not be disclosed. One page of the file is a complaint from a resident; it carries her mobile number and a note about her respiratory illness. The Public Information Officer (PIO) is on leave until 20 May and the office is unsure whether a reply is due on 2 June or later. The JE is asked to prepare the file, draft the reply, and flag any legal risk before the superintendent signs it.
1. Does the contractor's claim of "commercial confidence" automatically bar disclosure of the running bills, measurement book and quality-test reports? Explain the test you would apply, not merely the section number.
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No. Section 8(1)(d) of the RTI Act protects commercial confidence, trade secrets and similar information only where disclosure would harm the competitive position of a third party. That is a harm test, not a label a contractor can attach at will. For a contract already completed and paid for, the rates, quantities and bills are generally disclosable because they show how public money was spent. The measurement book is a public record of work actually done, and quality-test reports go to public safety, so the public-interest override in Section 8(2) weighs in favour of disclosure. If a small portion genuinely contains a trade secret, the PIO should use Section 10 (severability) and supply the rest with reasons recorded. The reply should state that the claim was examined and rejected or partly accepted on the harm test, not merely repeat the contractor's objection.
2. The PIO is on leave and no reply is issued by 2 June. What is the legal position, and what should the JE check before treating the case as a deemed refusal?
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Thirty days from 3 May ends on 2 June, so if no reply is issued the request is deemed refused under Section 7(2) and the applicant's first appeal lies within 30 days to the first appellate authority under Section 19(1). However, the JE must first check whether the contractor was given third-party notice under Section 11. If notice was issued within five days (by 8 May), the contractor had ten days to make a representation and the PIO may decide within 40 days of receipt, i.e. by 12 June. In that case 2 June is not the deadline. If no Section 11 notice was issued, the 30-day limit applies and the delay must be explained in writing; leave of the PIO is not a legal excuse, and an acting PIO should be designated. The JE should not backdate the file or antedate the reply.
3. The resident's complaint page contains her mobile number and a note about her illness. How should that page be handled in the reply?
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The complaint itself may be relevant to the road work, but the mobile number and medical note are personal information under Section 8(1)(j). The JE should apply the two-part test: whether the information is unrelated to public activity and whether disclosure would cause unwarranted invasion of privacy. A phone number and illness note ordinarily fail that test, so they should be redacted. The rest of the page can be disclosed using Section 10, which permits access to the non-exempt part after severing the exempt part. The PIO must record on the file why each redaction was made; a blanket refusal of the whole page would be vulnerable in appeal.