New Delhi:
The Right to Information Act has helped millions of citizens demand accountability from their government, get basic services from ration cards to water connections and even helped unearth details of the coal allotment scam.
But 10 years after India got one of its most powerful tools to fight corruption and seek transparency appears to be losing steam.
Appeals are piling up before the Central Information Commission, or CIC - the body that has the power to impose fines on government servants if they wrongfully delay or deny information.
In past, the CIC has imposed fines starting from Rs 250 for each day's delay in providing information to a maximum of Rs 25,000.
But for 9 months between August 2014 - when former Chief commissioner Rajiv Mathur retired -- and June 2015 work slowed to a crawl. Official sources say they are now trying to clear the pending appeals. The new commissioner is Vijai Sharma.
From 23,000 in February 2014, the appeals against officers have piled up to around 33,000.
"The message this sent out was that delays were okay as the bureaucracy also realised that they would not be penalised," said Venketash Nayak, who is with the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.
Responses from several ministries have slowed down and in many cases, information is not coming, he said.
One of the activists, Lokesh Batra, said even at the Prime Minister's office, which used to be very prompt, at least three of his RTI queries brought forth little or no information.
"I wanted to know about expenditure on the PM's foreign trips and had filed RTI applications with several Indian missions and the PMO," he said, is yet to get a proper response.
The states can also do with improvement. The CHRI says there are 20 per cent vacancies in state information commissions, which affected their functioning.
While the Congress today attacked the Narendra Modi government, alleging that it was trying to scuttle RTI, the BJP hit back, saying it was committed to transparency, blaming delays in information on government officers and the backlog at the CIC and state commissions.
Interestingly, despite the political one up-man ship, all political parties continue to maintain that they are exempt from the RTI despite two rulings by the CIC.