Given below are some examples. Please choose the appropriate link to see that example in detail. You may also use PREVIOUS and NEXT links to browse through all examples. Some examples relate to Delhi Right to Information Act 2001, however, that doesn't change the essence of the story.

1. Ashok Gupta gets his electricity connection

2. How Nannu got his ration card - and brought corrupt officials to their knees

3. Getting effective sanitation services for your area

4. Taking hisaab (accounts) from the government

5. Inspect government work - Hit corruption at the root

6. How your MLA used Constituency Development Fund

7. How does government handle corruption cases

8. Do you have a broken road?

9. Getting action taken against ST evader (view copies of application, reply here)

1. A sum of Rs.3.59 crores was refunded by Pune Municipal Corporation for wrongly taxing large number of citizens. RTI did it.
2. Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation waived off house tax of Rs.2.50 lakhs within 2 days of the filing of an RTI application by an aggrieved citizen.
3. Gujarat IAS and IPS officers can now access their ACRs as directed under RTI.
4. Government of India has amended rules for disclosing annual confidential reports to IAS, IPS and IFS officers, based on the decision of Gujarat Information Commission.
5. Income tax refund orders, pending for years, were delivered to assessees on filing RTI applications.
6. Bills pending for years of more than Rs.50 lakhs were paid by Govt. Organization within a few months, when a supplier filed an RTI application.
7. PIO of Supreme Court, Joint Secretary, SP, DSP, Dy. Collectors, University Registrar, Executive Engineer, Sachivalaya etc. fined/pulled up under RTI Act.
8. RBI ordered a Cooperative Bank to disclose audit reports.
9. A High Court Judge uses RTI and gets promotion.
10. One Information Commissioner of Central Information Commission, New Delhi himself filed an RTI application for his Govt. related problem.
11. A 17 year girl from Bangalore, through RTI, forced IIMs to make their admission process public, which was secretly guarded. It is now on the websites of IIMs.
12. Misuse of lakhs of rupees of Chief Minister’s Relief Fund was unearthed by one man in Mumbai through RTI.
13. A blind man exposed embezzlement of lakhs of rupees by government employees which were meant for his village near Rajkot, Gujarat.
14. Experience shows that government officers soften the moment they know that you know about RTI Act, as you may legally ask questions that may be embarrassing to them and their department/office.
15. Government employees and officers now hesitate to misuse their authority, lest the mess may come back to haunt them, just by an RTI application by an ordinary citizen.
16. Nine year old Pranav forced Delhi police to register an F.I.R. to trace his lost bicycle by filing an application under the RTI Act.
17. 70 year old Kaniram got his entitlements of food grain under Public Distribution System (PDS) that was denied to him for one year.
18. Many people found RTI useful in obtaining ration cards, passports, driving licenses, water connections, copies of F.I.R.s and so on, without paying bribes! But Indians are not going to stop there.
19. Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti in Assam used RTI to expose diversion of food grains from PDS allotted to the poor. Women in a small village in West Bengal filed more than 100 RTI applications to force the administration to start work on supply of drinking water.
20. An RTI application has forced Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital in the capital to provide free treatment to an old woman who couldn't afford her surgery. Her son Ali alleged that the hospital had earlier sought medicines worth Rs.30,000 for the operation. Ali filed an RTI application asking details of drug stocks and bills. When Ali approached the Delhi High Court, the hospital pledged, before the Court, to operate her free of cost.
21. Students forced Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) to disclose cut-off marks, scaling method and model answers. A decision pronounced by the Central Information Commission (CIC) gives access to, not just your answer sheets, but also your class mate's answer sheets, after evaluation.
22. When Rohit Prajapati filed an RTI application asking the Gujarat state government details about Internal Complaints Committees to deal with cases of sexual harassment at workplace, in its departments as directed by the Supreme Court in Vishakha and Others v State of Rajasthan and Others (1997), the officials in many departments woke up and formed the committees.
23. A 15-year-old rape victim in Umarpada in Gujarat used RTI to force police to lodge an FIR and take action against the accused.
24. Intellectuals led by SEZ Virodhi Manch and Goa Bachao Abhiyan in Goa sensibly used RTI and obtained crucial documents to launch a successful battle against Special Economic Zones (SEZs) while people lost their lives fighting a similar battle in other states. In the first incident of a reversal of a central policy, eight SEZ proposals in Goa were scrapped by the inter-ministerial Board of Approvals in February 2008.
25. About 300 RTI applications filed by Burning Brain Society about the implementation and enforcement of tobacco control laws and the name of the person responsible for non-implementation made Chandigarh the first smoke-free city not only in India but also in any developing country.
26. Environment seems to be the main beneficiary! Environmental activist Divya Raghunandan fought for more than 20 months for toxicity, allergenicity data that determine the safety of Genetically Modified Organisms -Genetically Engineered (GE) rice, GE mustard, GE okra and GE brinjal from MNCs obsessed with secrecy; she was even asked to personally inspect documents in the presence of a representative. After CIC had decided in favor of disclosure, the company dragged CIC to the courts. However, the Supreme Court interfered and ordered disclosure of the safety data. Finally, the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) has published voluminous of data on biosafety studies of GE brinjal on its website.
27. The National Environment Appellate Authority quashed environmental clearance accorded to the Polavaram inter state irrigation project, in December last year as the executive summary of the project was not made available to the affected persons in their language.
28. Kalpavriksh, environmental activist group obtained documents showing that environmental clearances issued to Dow Corning India Pvt. Ltd's Ranjangaon plant by the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board were based on a site map of the company's plant in Elizabethtown, Kentucky (US).
29. Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment revealed that a bauxite mining project located in Ratnagiri, Maharashtra compiled reports for environmental impact assessment, based on data simply copied from a Russian bauxite mine report.
30. One cannot withhold records simply saying that one lost them. Ministry of Environment & Forests was asked to lodge an FIR to initiate criminal action against those responsible for the alleged loss of documents regarding environmental clearance and other parameters of the Maheshwar Hydro Electric Project, Madhya Pradesh.
31. People had complained maximum penalty under the RTI Act - Rs. 25,000 is not a figure to deter. But the CIC thought differently. CIC imposed penalty of Rs.125,000 on Public Information Officer (PIO) of Daulat Ram College, Delhi for delay in supply of information in connection with five separate RTI applications by Prof. Pramila Sharma. Punjab information commission too imposed a penalty of Rs.50,000 on a PIO in connection with two applications filed by single individual.
32. In a landmark Decision, compensation was awarded to an old woman by the CIC for non-publication of information of beneficiaries on the Old Age Pension Scheme under the mandatory proactive publication.
33. CIC directed the Benaras Hindu University to admit Dhananjay into post graduate course, who was earlier denied admission because he filed an RTI application, to ensure that an applicant seeking information from the University under RTI Act is not victimized in future.
34. Another student used RTI to get her degree successfully from a university in Tamilnadu. Though she had appeared in an examination along with other students a few years ago, she did not get her results as her answer sheet sent for valuation to a professor of an outside university had been misplaced.
35. When Tamilnadu Information Commission directed it to pay a few lakhs as compensation, the university authorities immediately conducted an examination for the student and awarded her degree after evaluation of her answer paper.
36. In earlier days, employees feared that RTI might overburden them. But now none is surprised to find more number applications are being filed by the employees themselves. Recently, Directorate of Education (GNCT of Delhi) was asked to pay compensation of Rs. 50,000 to a teacher suspended on false evidence.
37. Evaluated answer sheets, Departmental Promotion Committee minutes, Annual Confidential Reports, transfer guidelines, arrears and what not…RTI has become an efficient in-house grievance redressal mechanism. Heather Brooke, FOI activist in U.K., points out, "The current system only rewards the corrupt and inefficient. If you are hard working, it is to your benefit to have transparency."
38. Ratnaji, a blind man of Rangaru village in Rajkot, was laughed at for being blind at the village panchayat meeting when he had wanted to know the progress of development works. They told him, "You are blind and burden on the village. Stay home and the village will feed you." He used RTI to obtain from the district office information that exposed the corruption in village works. The documents showed that many works registered as completed were actually never taken up and remain incomplete. Ratnaji's RTI application had turned the one-man battle into a mass movement in the village.