The main legal point established in the judgment is the requirement for RTI applications to be bona fide in the larger public interest without causing an unwarranted invasion of privacy, as interpreted in Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act and judicially in Girish Ramchandra Deshpande case.

JUDGMENT :

G.S. Patel J.

1. This common order and judgment will dispose of both Writ Petitions. In both matters we issue Rule on 29th November 2021.

2. Writ Petition No. 1066 of 2021 is filed by one Rajendra Goyal Alias Raju Goyal (“Goyal”). Writ Petition No. 603 of 2021 is filed by the State of Maharashtra.

3. The 2nd Petitioner in Writ Petition No. 603 of 2021 is the Additional Superintendent of Police, Anti Corruption Bureau, Thane. Goyal is the 1st Respondent to the State Government’s Petition. The State Information Commissioner is the 2nd Respondent.

4. In Goyal’s Petition, the Public Information Officer (“PIO”) of Anti Corruption Bureau, Thane is the 1st Respondent. The Additional Superintendent Police, the First Appellate Authority is the 2nd Respondent. The second Appellate Authority, the State Information Commissioner is the 3rd Respondent. The State of Maharashtra is the 4th Respondent. One Dilip Ghevare (“Ghevare”), Town Planner in Thane, has been added by an amendment as the 5th Respondent to Goyal’s Petition.

5. Both Petitions deal with the same order, one dated 24th August 2020 issued by the Second Appellate Authority. Goyal wants this order implemented in full. The State Government asks that it be quashed and set aside.

6. One of the questions that arises from Goyal’s Petition is the question of whether his Petition can at all be fairly said to be bona fide. Who is Goyal, and what does he claim to be? This may not be directly relevant to the filing of an RTI query. It is certainly a question of consequence when a party comes to this Court and invokes our jurisdiction under Articles 226 and 227 of the Constitution of India. In his Petition, Goyal begins by describing himself as a ‘social activist’, an expression that is increasingly fashionable these days when a party wants to be as vague as possible about what he or she really does. It seems to have now became an avocation alongside well-established disciplines to say that one is a social activists as if that encompasses the universe of all activities without need of further clarity, and as if that automatically sanctifies or lends bona fides to the petitioner before the Court. But in Goyal’s Petition itself at page 5, possibly by more by accident than design, we find that the truth slips out. Goyal himself says he is in the business of real estate. This becomes consequential when we see that entire purport and target of his Writ Petition is the 5th Respondent, Ghevare, the town planner in Thane.

7. Goyal’s RTI application dated 18th January 2019 is apparently innocuous in the first part. It seeks a disclosure about an open enquiry, identified as Open Enquiry No. 58/Thane/2017. It then seeks the fullness of information about this enquiry until date.

8. It is the third sub-item of item 3 of the RTI application that goes further and says that what is demanded is, though in the context of the Open Enquiry No. 58/Thane/2017, the papers relating to Dilip Ghevare. Of these papers in sub-item 3 an unqualified and open inspection is sought.

9. There would ordinarily have been no difficulty with merely the enquiry report, but for the fact that the enquiry report has annexed to it a large amount of personal information pertaining to Ghevare and his family members. Sub-clause 3 makes it clear that the object of Goyal’s affections or disaffections is in fact none other than Ghevare.

10. Now Section 8 of the Right To Information Act (“RTI Act”) reads thus:

“8. Exemption from disclosure of information.—(1) Notwithstanding anything contained in this Act, there shall be no obligation to give any citizen,—

(a) information, disclosure of which would prejudicially affect the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security, strategic, scientific or economic interests of the State, relation with foreign State or lead to incitement of an offence;

(b) information which has been expressly forbidden to be published by any Court of law or tribunal or the disclosure of which may constitute contempt of