The story of Second Appeal No. S01/A/1390/2025 is, at bottom, a story about Tehsildar Sadar & Administrative Accountability. Explicitly, a citizen asked a simple, direct question: why did a Lekhpal ignore a clear court order for over a year, and who in the administration allowed it? Instead of promptly answering, the office of the Tehsildar Sadar let the matter drift through unnecessary police referrals, unofficial WhatsApp messages, and a dizzying chain of transfers across five separate public authorities. While no single act looked scandalous on its own, each individual step seemed defensible; nevertheless, none of them ever produced a real, substantive answer. Ultimately, that widening gap between plausible bureaucratic process and genuine accountability is exactly what the RTI Act was designed to close, and precisely what this case, hearing after hearing, continues to expose instead.
Key Takeaways
- The case highlights the failure of the Tehsildar Sadar’s office to provide accountability, as a Lekhpal ignored a court order for over a year.
- Instead of answering the RTI query, officials redirected the issue to the police, evading responsibility for the administrative lapse.
- Repeated transfers of the RTI application among various public authorities delayed responses and obscured accountability.
- Officials used informal communication methods, undermining the reliability of records and further eroding administrative accountability.
- This case exemplifies how bureaucratic processes can obscure accountability through small, defensible steps rather than outright misconduct.
Tehsildar Sadar & Administrative Accountability: A Case Study in RTI Evasion
Thirteen months. Five separate public authorities. Zero substantive answers.
That is the arithmetic of an ongoing Right to Information (RTI) matter against the office of the Tehsildar Sadar, Mirzapur. Moreover, the Uttar Pradesh State Information Commission is now hearing it as Second Appeal No. S01/A/1390/2025. At its core, the case serves as a poignant study in Tehsildar Sadar & Administrative Accountability. Specifically, it illustrates what occurs when a public office faces a direct question regarding its own failures — yet continues to discover new ways to avoid providing an answer. While the underlying facts are narrow, the pattern they reveal is far from it.
The Question That Started It All: A Test of Administrative Accountability at the Tehsildar Sadar’s Office
At the heart of the matter sits one simple administrative failure. Specifically, on 13 September 2024, a revenue court in Mirzapur passed an order in a land-partition case. Evidently, this order directed the village Lekhpal — an official who works under the Tehsildar Sadar — to submit a partition report. However, that report never materialized; consequently, it remained missing for over a year despite repeated reminders.
Evidently, the applicant filed an RTI request with the Chief Minister’s Office. Simply, It asked one clear question: who is accountable for this delay? Specifically, the request sought the names and designations of the officials responsible for the non-compliance. It also asked, critically, why officials had treated the matter as a police issue rather than a routine revenue failure under the Tehsildar Sadar’s own jurisdiction.
This is not an unusual ask. After all, the RTI Act, 2005, exists so citizens can trace responsibility inside government machinery. It lets them hold offices like the Tehsildar Sadar to genuine administrative accountability — instead of hearing, in effect, “somewhere, someone is handling it.”
The Misdirection: From the Tehsildar Sadar’s Revenue Desk to the Police Station
Officials never answered the question. Instead, they referred the grievance concerning the Tehsildar Sadar’s office to the police for inquiry. Consequently, a police investigation ensued, and its own report, dated 21 May 2025, succinctly recorded a simple word in the relevant column: “Nil.” In other words, investigators ultimately substantiated no allegation against any party.
This finding deserves attention. The police had already examined the matter and found nothing warranting further action. Despite this, officials still initiated preventive proceedings against one of the parties, citing an unrelated provision: Section 126/135 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (the successor to Sections 107/116 of the CrPC). Their stated ground was simply an “apprehension of breach of peace.”
A land-partition dispute pending before a revenue court is not, on its face, a law-and-order emergency. Indeed, the applicant’s own contemporaneous complaint made this point clearly, and he filed it even before the RTI itself. The matter was never about policing; rather, it concerned why a Lekhpal, working under the Tehsildar Sadar, ignored a court order for over a year. Relabeling an administrative failure as a “police matter” does more than misclassify the problem — it shifts the question to an office with no power to answer it. As a result, it quietly shields the Tehsildar Sadar’s office from the administrative accountability the applicant actually sought.
Five Points, One Year, No Answers From the Tehsildar Sadar
The RTI application asked five specific, answerable questions; moreover, each one targeted administrative accountability directly:
- Who ultimately concluded that this was, in fact, a police matter?
- Why didn’t officials forward it to the Sub-Divisional Magistrate, whose office actually oversees this kind of revenue proceeding?
- Subsequently, what action did officials take against the Lekhpal for non-compliance?
- Who in the Chief Minister’s office, consequently, accepted and endorsed the flawed classification?
- Consequently, could the office provide legible copies of two otherwise illegible pages from an existing report?
Notably, no one properly answered these points, not once, across more than half a dozen hearings before the Commission. Instead, the Public Information Officer at the Tehsildar Sadar’s office offered only the court case’s procedural status each time: pending, then dismissed, then restored. In effect, officials repeatedly substituted the status of litigation for the substance of the request. This is a subtle but effective technique — answer a question nobody asked, and let the real one go unaddressed by omission rather than outright refusal. Consequently, administrative accountability stays perpetually one step out of reach.
The Transfer Merry-Go-Round: Accountability Passed From Desk to Desk
Explicitly, the RTI application’s own journey offers the clearest evidence of institutional evasion. Obviously, the applicant filed it originally with the Chief Minister’s Office. From there, officials transferred it repeatedly: first to the Home Department, then to the Police Range Office, then to the Superintendent of Police’s office. It finally reached the District Magistrate’s office, which holds direct oversight over the Tehsildar Sadar. Finally, that amounts to four transfers and five separate registration numbers. Over a year passed before the application even reached an authority arguably positioned to answer it.
The RTI Act sets a five-day window for transferring a misdirected application to the correct authority. Yet this case took well over 400 times that long. Meanwhile, even offices that had already closed their own inquiry into this exact grievance months earlier had to weigh in again — producing nothing but further delay, and further distance from genuine administrative accountability.
Procedure as a Second Front
Alongside the substantive stonewalling, a quieter procedural pattern emerged from the Tehsildar Sadar’s office. For instance, officials delivered responses via unofficial WhatsApp numbers rather than registered post or the applicant’s verified email. Similarly, they sent documents minutes before hearings, leaving no real opportunity to review or respond. In one striking episode, someone even sent an entirely unrelated citizen’s case file — involving a different applicant altogether — to the wrong person’s phone. Individually, these lapses look small. Together, however, they compound into something larger. The paper trail itself becomes unreliable, leaving citizens unable to verify what was said, when, or by whom. Each lapse, in turn, further erodes administrative accountability.
Why This Case Matters Beyond Itself
It would be easy to read this as one citizen’s frustrating battle with red tape at a single tehsil office. However, the pattern teaches something bigger. Consequently, none of it required any dramatic act of misconduct; there was no bribery, no falsified records, and no outright refusal. Instead, it required only the ordinary machinery of bureaucracy — a transfer here, a status update there, and a WhatsApp message instead of a formal letter — repeated just often enough that a legitimate question never quite got reached.
That, arguably, is the more troubling lesson about Tehsildar Sadar & Administrative Accountability. It doesn’t usually fail with a bang; instead, it fails through a thousand small, defensible steps. Each one looks plausible alone, yet none of them add up to an answer. Ultimately, the RTI Act was designed as a check against exactly this kind of diffuse evasion. Whether the Commission’s coming orders can cut through it, in this case and others like it, remains to be seen.
This account draws on documents filed in an ongoing proceeding before the Uttar Pradesh State Information Commission (Appeal No. S01/A/1390/2025) against the office of the Tehsildar Sadar, Mirzapur. It reflects the applicant’s submissions on record as of July 2026.
Here’s the consolidated reference list of Application/Registration IDs, emails, mobile numbers, and web links for all public authorities involved in this matter; additionally, this information has been compiled from the documents shared throughout this conversation.
Application / Registration IDs (Tehsildar Sadar & Administrative Accountability)
| Authority | Registration/Reference No. | Date |
|---|---|---|
| UP State Information Commission (Second Appeal) | A-20250902068 / File No. S01/A/1390/2025 | — |
| Latest submission (Diary No.) | D-260720260022 | 26/07/2026 |
| Chief Minister’s Office (original RTI) | DOCMO/R/2025/60448 | 27/05/2025 |
| Home Department (1st transfer) | DHOME/R/2025/80166 | — |
| Police Range Office, Mirzapur (2nd transfer) | PROMZ/R/2026/80002 | 24/06/2026 |
| SP Office, Mirzapur (3rd transfer) | SPMZR/R/2026/80032 | 20/07/2026 |
| District Magistrate Office, Mirzapur (4th transfer) | DMOMR/R/2026/90002 | 21/07/2026 |
| Jansunwai/CM Helpline Grievance | 60000250091069 | 27/05/2025 |
| PMO Grievance Portal | PMOPG/E/2025/0058583 | 26/04/2025 |
| IGRS (State) Grievance | GOVUP/E/2025/0013414 | 09/02/2025 |
| Third-party mix-up case (unrelated) | A-20250900808 (S01/A/0825/2025, S01/A/0879/2025) | — |
Emails (Tehsildar Sadar & Administrative Accountability)
| Name / Office | |
|---|---|
| Hearing Officer, UP Information Commission (Raj Kumar Vishwakarma) | hearingcourts1.upic@up.gov.in |
| Tehsildar Sadar, Mirzapur (office) | teh-sadar.mi@up.gov.in |
| Tehsil Sadar (alternate) | tehsilsadar025@gmail.com |
| SDM Sadar, Mirzapur | sdm-sadar.mi@up.gov.in |
| District Magistrate, Mirzapur | dmmir@nic.in |
| DM Office Nodal Officer (Vinod Kumar Singh) | (same — dmmir@nic.in) |
| PIO, Home Department (Rajeev Kumar Dubey) | shome.p11@up.gov.in |
| Nodal Officer, Home Department (Raj Kumar) | shome.p15@up.gov.in |
| Joint Secretary, CM Secretariat (Arvind Mohan) | arvind.12574@gov.in |
| ASP Operations / SP Office (Rajkumar Meena) | aspopmzp@gmail.com |
| Nodal Officer, SP Office | addlspopmzr@gmail.com |
| IG Range, Mirzapur | digrmir@nic.in |
| CC’d on appeals | vrc396mirzapur@gmail.com, vrc397majhawan@gmail.com |
| Applicant (you) | yogimpsingh@gmail.com |
Mobile Numbers (Tehsildar Sadar & Administrative Accountability)
| Name / Office | Number |
|---|---|
| Applicant (Yogi M.P. Singh) | 7379105911 |
| Tehsildar Sadar office (per Commission notice) | 9454411960 |
| Vivek Jawla, Circle Officer (City), Mirzapur | 9454401590 |
| PIO, Home Dept. / Nodal Officer, Home Dept. | PIO: Ajendra Singh (9454411960) Nodal: Sri Raj Kumar (9454411896) |
| DIG Range, Mirzapur | 9454400215 |
| ASP Operations, SP Office | 9454401105, 9473567333 |
| Nodal Officer, DM Office | 89454416823 |
| CM Secretariat (landline) | 05222226350, 9454410972, 9454412736,9454411282 |
| Unofficial WhatsApp number used by PIO (22.06.2026) | +91 80054 94979 |
| Applicant’s other number (third-party mix-up incident) | 8423806445 |
Web Links / Portals (Tehsildar Sadar & Administrative Accountability)
| Portal | URL |
|---|---|
| Departmental portal (for PIO uploads, per Commission notice) | https://upsic.up.in/ |
| RTI Online, Uttar Pradesh | https://rtionline.up.gov.in |
| Public Grievance Portal (PMO/PG Portal) | https://pgportal.gov.in |
| UP Information Commission address | 7/7A, RTI Bhawan, Vibhuti Khand, Gomti Nagar, Lucknow |
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