Truth of Ecourt Campaign & RTI: What One Case Reveals About India’s Deemed Refusal Problem

The Truth of Ecourt Campaign & RTI compliance — a real case study of deemed refusal, ₹7,210 crore in e-Courts funding, and why judgments still don’t reach citizens on time. The Ecourt campaign was initially launched with the aim of modernizing the judicial system and improving access to justice for all citizens. However, despite the substantial investment of ₹7,210 crore, many challenges persist that impede the timely delivery of judgments. A significant issue arises from the lack of transparency and accountability in the RTI compliance mechanism. Cases often face delays due to bureaucratic hurdles, inadequate infrastructure, and a shortage of trained personnel. As a result, citizens are left in the dark regarding the status of their cases, leading to a sense of frustration and mistrust in the judicial system. Effective measures must be implemented to ensure that the benefits of the Ecourt initiative truly reach the people.

Introduction (Truth of Ecourt Campaign & RTI)

The Right to Information Act, 2005 rests on a simple promise. Citizens ask, and the state answers — within thirty days, no excuses. However, more than two decades later, that promise still breaks down in ordinary, unremarkable ways. It rarely fails through dramatic denials or claims of national security; rather, it fails through something quieter and more corrosive: silence.

This is the Truth of Ecourt Campaign & RTI in practice. A case now pending before the Uttar Pradesh State Information Commission — Second Appeal No. S01/A/1223/2026 — shows exactly how that silence unfolds, stage by stage. It matters far beyond the one applicant involved.

The Request That Started It All

Naresh Kumar Jaiswal filed an RTI application on 4 March 2026 with the Law Department (Nyaya Vibhag), Government of Uttar Pradesh. In this instance, his request was narrow and administrative; furthermore, it required no third-party consultation and, notably, touched none of the exemptions under Section 8 of the Act.

He wanted to know why a court judgment, delivered on 24 July 2025 in a family court matter, still hadn’t appeared on the official e-Courts portal seven months later. The portal itself listed the case as “Disposed” — yet the judgment simply wasn’t there. He also asked for the department’s policy on judgment-upload timelines and the name of a grievance officer he could approach.

The RTI Act exists precisely to handle requests like this one smoothly: factual, verifiable, low-stakes for the department, high-stakes for the citizen. A judgment that exists on paper but not on the public portal isn’t a minor inconvenience. It can block a person’s ability to pursue further legal remedies, apply for certified copies, or simply know where they stand.

Stage One: The Thirty-Day Deadline That Wasn’t

Section 7(1) of the RTI Act gives a Public Information Officer thirty days to respond. However, that doesn’t mean thirty days to grant the request; rather, it means thirty days to respond at all, even with a reasoned refusal. In this case, the deadline passed on 3–4 April 2026 without so much as an acknowledgment. Moreover, no interim reply arrived, and nobody asked for clarification or invoked an exemption. Ultimately, only silence prevailed.

RTI jurisprudence calls this a “deemed refusal.” The law treats non-response as a rejection. That lets the applicant appeal as though the department had actually refused him. It’s a useful legal fiction, but it exposes something uncomfortable too: a department can deny information without any official ever writing down a reason. In practice, the absence of a reason works exactly like the presence of one.

Stage Two: The Appellate Authority Repeats the Pattern

The Act anticipates this exact scenario; consequently, it incorporates a First Appeal under Section 19(1). This provision grants a senior officer the opportunity to intervene, review the PIO’s inaction, and subsequently either direct disclosure or document a proper rejection. Notably, Jaiswal filed this appeal on 20 April 2026, which was forty-seven days after his original application.

What followed, however, wasn’t correction; it was, unfortunately, repetition. The First Appellate Authority is, by statute, required to dispose of the appeal within thirty days, extendable to forty-five with recorded reasons. Instead, it issued no order, scheduled no hearing, and sent no communication at all. Consequently, the mechanism designed to catch a PIO’s default ended up mirroring it instead.

This may be the more troubling failure of the two. While one might chalk up a PIO’s silence to overwork or oversight, an appellate authority’s silence, conversely, undermines something more important: the internal check on which the entire Act relies to resolve disputes without pushing every case up to a state commission.

Stage Three: Escalation to the State Commission

Both internal remedies were now exhausted, 104 days after the original application. Jaiswal filed a Second Appeal under Section 19(3) before the UP State Information Commission on 16 June 2026. The Commission registered the matter, issued a formal notice on 5 August 2026, and fixed a hearing for 12 August 2026. That notice directed both respondents to file a written statement at least two days in advance and to serve a copy on the appellant.

This is where the pattern turns instructive. Even a direct procedural order from a quasi-judicial body — not a request, but a notice with a deadline — appears to have gone unanswered. One could chalk up earlier silences to administrative inertia. Silence in the face of the Commission’s own notice is harder to read as anything but a deliberate choice not to engage.

The Real Truth of Ecourt Campaign & RTI Funding

The seven-month gap between disposal and upload is hard to excuse for one specific reason. To illustrate, consider the scale of public money behind the platform meant to prevent exactly this. Furthermore, the e-Courts Mission Mode Project is not a shoestring initiative.

Phases I and II together cost a little over ₹2,300 crore. The Union Cabinet approved Phase III in September 2023, running through 2027. It carries a sanctioned outlay of ₹7,210 crore — more than four times the Phase II budget. That money was meant to build “digital and paperless courts” and expand the National Judicial Data Grid. It was also meant to modernize record-keeping, so litigants would no longer chase paper trails through district registries. The 2026–27 Union Budget kept the annual allocation steady at ₹1,200 crore, so this funding pipeline remains very much active.

Government literature describes the goal in plain terms: a justice system that is more “accessible, affordable, predictable, reliable and transparent.” The National Judicial Data Grid backs that claim. It now hosts information on tens of crores of cases and orders nationwide.

Set against that backdrop, this case becomes a small but telling counterexample. Indeed, a single disposed judgment sat for over half a year without appearing on the very portal built with crore-scale public funds to display exactly this kind of record. This situation is not a technology failure; rather, the infrastructure clearly works elsewhere. Instead, it highlights a compliance and monitoring failure sitting downstream of a well-funded system. Furthermore, building a portal costs money. However, making sure every court actually feeds it, promptly and consistently, requires attention — and that’s the part nobody seems to be tracking.

Where the Accountability Gap Actually Sits

Here lies the heart of the Truth of the Ecourt Campaign & RTI story: an individual grievance that doubles as a diagnostic tool. However, no visible mechanism ties Phase III’s crore-scale spending to court-level compliance. Moreover, large sums have gone into cloud storage, case-information software, and network connectivity reaching over 99% of court complexes. Yet, nothing in this case suggests any practical machinery ensures that infrastructure gets used consistently. Consequently, that gap shows up at the point closest to the citizen — a single district court, in a single case, after disposal.

There’s a deeper irony here too. Indeed, RTI becomes the only lever left once the transparency infrastructure itself goes quiet. Furthermore, the entire premise of e-Courts is that citizens shouldn’t need to file RTI applications at all; rather, the portal should simply inform them about what happened in their own cases. Unfortunately, when that fails, an applicant gets pushed back onto the slower, more adversarial machinery of the RTI Act, only to discover that this machinery is equally unresponsive.

Two separate transparency systems, both funded and mandated by the state, failed in sequence on the same underlying fact. That’s not a coincidence worth dismissing lightly. A PIO failing to answer a question is one kind of failure. A funded system failing to make that question unnecessary is another matter entirely — and arguably the more serious one.

Why This Pattern Matters Beyond One Case

Reading this as a story about one delayed judgment and one persistent applicant would be easy — and wrong. It’s really about the wider Truth of Ecourt Campaign & RTI compliance picture across the country. This structural problem shows up across departments and states with some regularity:

Deemed refusal carries no real cost until very late. Section 20 penalties only kick in after a full second-appeal process. A PIO who does nothing at all faces no consequence for months. That’s sometimes longer than the wait a PIO faces after issuing a prompt, reasoned rejection that the applicant can actually challenge on its merits.

Appellate authorities exist to be a check, not a second point of failure. When a First Appellate Authority mirrors the PIO’s inaction instead of correcting it, something breaks. The entire two-tier appeal structure collapses into a single, slower version of the same problem.

The e-Courts accountability gap isn’t a funding problem. With ₹7,210 crore riding on Phase III alone, this counts among the better-funded public digital infrastructure programmes in the country. Judgments sitting undisclosed for months after disposal reflects a failure of monitoring and enforcement — not a shortage of money or technology.

Non-compliance escalates without changing shape. No single failure here was extreme. What’s striking is that the same failure — silence — repeated itself at every successive stage, including before a body with actual power to penalize it.

What Applicants Can Take From This

A few practical lessons stand out for anyone navigating a similar deemed-refusal situation. Keep a precise chronology from day one; dates matter enormously once a matter reaches a commission. File appeals promptly instead of waiting to see if a late response shows up. And when a commission issues its own procedural notice, document the other side’s compliance — or non-compliance — with that notice specifically. It becomes independent evidence of institutional attitude, separate from the merits of the original request.

Conclusion: The Truth of Ecourt Campaign & RTI Cannot Stay Buried in Silence

Four straightforward administrative questions shouldn’t require this many steps under the RTI Act. The e-Courts project, in turn, was never meant to leave those questions unanswered in the first place. Yet cases like this one show something else. Simple non-response, repeated at every level, can still hollow out a well-designed statutory timeline — even one sitting right alongside a well-funded digital infrastructure programme. Eventually an applicant has no option left. He must escalate all the way to a state commission, armed with little more than dates, notices, and a paper trail of silence.

Whether the Commission’s hearing produces disclosure, penalty, or both, one lesson holds. Neither transparency laws nor transparency budgets mean much without officials willing to actually answer. That is, in the end, the real Truth of Ecourt Campaign & RTI in India today. & RTI in India today.

Application / Registration IDs (Truth of Ecourt Campaign & RTI)

Stage	ID / Number
RTI Application (Sec 6(1))	DPLAW/R/2026/60044
First Appeal (Sec 19(1))	DPLAW/A/2026/60034
Second Appeal (Sec 19(3)) — Registration No.	A-20260601678
Second Appeal — File/Case No.	S01/A/1223/2026
Commission Notice No.	202608S01N100067
Commission Diary No. (e-filed submission)	D-110820260136
Gorakhpur Case (CNR)	UPGK020022402021
Gorakhpur Case Registration No.	915/2021

Public Authority Contact Details (Truth of Ecourt Campaign & RTI)

Role	Name	Mobile	Email
PIO (Respondent No. 1)	Bhawana Rajpoot, Section Officer	9454413289	nyayanubhag6@gmail.com
First Appellate Authority (Respondent No. 2)	Dr. Satyavan Singh, Special Secretary	8874239610	lanushravanprakosthalaw@gmail.com
Nodal Officer	Shri Kripa Shankar	9454413289	kripa.13887@gov.in
Commission Hearing Registry (S-1)	Raj Kumar Vishwakarma / Razi Ahmad Warsi (Presiding Officer, digitally signed)	—	hearingcourts1.upic@up.gov.in
Secondary Law Dept. contact (CC’d on hearing thread)	—	—	nyayanubhag3@gmail.com

Note: The PIO’s and Nodal Officer’s mobile numbers appear identical (9454413289) across the documents — both are listed this way in the official records, so I haven’t altered them.

Applicant’s Own Details (Truth of Ecourt Campaign & RTI)

Field	Detail
Name	Naresh Kumar Jaiswal
Mobile	9005697304
Email	nareshkumarjaiswal8@gmail.com

Web Links / Portals (Truth of Ecourt Campaign & RTI)

Portal	URL
UP RTI Online (application/appeal filing & status)	https://rtionline.up.gov.in
UP State Information Commission (case status lookup)	https://upsic.up.gov.in
Gorakhpur District Court — e-Courts case status	https://gorakhpur.dcourts.gov.in/case-status-search-by-case-number/
Written statement submission (Commission-designated inbox)	hearingcourts1.upic@up.gov.in