RIGHT TO INFORMATION AND CONSUMER PROTECTION

Author – Gauresg Chaudhary, National Law School of India Universiry, Bangalore

Best Citation – Gauresg Chaudhary, RIGHT TO INFORMATION AND CONSUMER PROTECTION, ILE Consumer Protection Law and Review, 1 (1) of 2023, Pg. 07-17, ISBN – 978-81-961120-4-2.

Introduction

Right to Information Act is not only a statute which provides right to information to the citizens but also grants them power to disclose the wrongdoings or corruption in the system. Citizens who are normal people gets the power to disclose corruption also gets the risk of civil or criminal attacks on them as they only have power to ask the information but not are secured in themselves like a on duty government officer asking the information. Hence the protection of the RTI applicant is something which even comes former than the right to information. Is the RTI Act able to protect the applicant is one of the question dealt in this paper. In addition, the paper has looked into the applicant protected as consumer under the COPRA and how Court dealt in the same. The whole paper has been divided into 4 parts which are further divided into sub parts. First part of this paper deals with the main question of can the applicant considered a consumer. The part discusses the Court ruling on the same. Later in this part, the reasoning of the court has been critically analyzed with the help of old precedents and different High Court reasoning. Second part of this paper deals with the issue of Private bodies where the consumers does not get any right to information because of private bodies not getting themselves included under the ambit of RTI Act. Third part of this paper has highlighted several protection issues with regards to the applicant which the RTI Act is not able to fulfill. This part also contain some case studies to highlight to problems applicant face which are not even solved even after getting protection from the RTI Act that was available. Fourth part of the paper is based on a suggestive approach which can be taken to solve the protection problems of the applicant. The suggestion put forward are based on own ideas from the analysis drawn in the paper and the suggestion of different scholars in the field.