Section 24(4) of the Right to Information Act: Tamil Nadu's Withdrawn Exemption Order

The Order, and Its Withdrawal

• A Government Order dated 21 September 2026 exempted the Public (Law and Order) Department of Tamil Nadu from the ambit of the Right to Information Act, 2005, on the ground that it was an intelligence and security organisation.
• The order was issued by the Human Resources Management Department under Section 24(4) of the Act and was then notified in the Government Gazette, which is the step the section itself requires.
• The government decided on Sunday to withdraw the order after severe criticism, and the Minister for Energy Resources and Law, C.T.R. Nirmal Kumar, announced the withdrawal.
• Earlier the same day, speaking in Madurai, the Minister had defended the order, saying that only certain matters, including the details of communal clashes, had been kept out of the Act's ambit given the sensitivity of the information.
• The objection pressed against it was that the entire law and order section of a general administrative department could not be lifted out of the Act's reach in one stroke.

What Section 24 Actually Permits

• Section 24 is the Act's institutional exemption. Unlike the exemptions in Section 8, which keep out particular kinds of information, Section 24 keeps out a named organisation as a whole, which is why it is the harder power to use.
• Section 24(1) covers the Union. The Act does not apply to the intelligence and security organisations specified in the Second Schedule, nor to the information those bodies furnish to the government.
• Section 24(4) is the counterpart for a State. It lets a State government exempt an intelligence or security organisation established by that government, and only by a notification in the Official Gazette.
• The words limit the power. The body exempted has to be an intelligence or a security organisation, so the section does not offer a State a general route to place an ordinary department beyond the Act.
• The exemption is not absolute even where it applies. The first proviso says information on allegations of corruption and human rights violation is not excluded, so those two categories survive the exemption.
• The second proviso adds a procedure for the second category. Information sought on an allegation of a human rights violation is to be provided only after the approval of the State Information Commission, and within 45 days of the request.
• An exemption under Section 24 therefore removes the ordinary route of a request under Section 6 and its disposal under Section 7, while leaving the corruption and human rights window open.

What the Public (Law and Order) Department Holds

• The Department deals with communal and caste clashes, which is the subject the Minister named while defending the order.
• It handles the appointment of Commissions of Inquiry into law and order matters and the follow up action taken on their recommendations.
• It holds all matters relating to detentions under COFEPOSA, the Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Activities Act, and under the National Security Act, which are preventive detention laws under which a person is detained without trial.
• That includes the representations made by detenus and the habeas corpus petitions filed by them or on their behalf in the High Court and the Supreme Court, the writ by which a court tests the legality of a detention.
• It conducts the monthly law and order review meetings and the special law and order meetings held under the instructions of the Chief Secretary.
• It examines the inquiry reports into the opening of fire by the police, and the inquiry reports into deaths in police custody, police torture and the deaths of remand prisoners.
• It also deals with the sanction of prosecution for defamatory articles, news items and speeches, the permission without which such a prosecution cannot be launched.

Why the Exemption Was Contested

• The overlap with the provisos is the heart of the objection. Deaths in custody, police torture and police firing are precisely the subjects that fall under allegations of human rights violation, which Section 24 expressly refuses to exclude.
• An institutional exemption also sweeps in what a case by case exemption would not. Under Section 8 an authority has to justify withholding a particular file; under Section 24 it withholds everything and justifies nothing.
• The classification itself was the weaker ground. A department that runs review meetings, appoints Commissions of Inquiry and sanctions prosecutions is performing general administration, which is not the same thing as an intelligence or a security organisation.
• Preventive detention is the other reason the file matters. A person held under COFEPOSA or the National Security Act has not been convicted, and the record of the detention is often the only material from which its legality can be questioned.
• There is a recent precedent for a withdrawal of this kind. A circular on collegiate education, issued after a law and order meeting chaired by Chief Secretary M. Sai Kumar, was withdrawn after the minutes of that meeting became public and drew opposition.
• With the order rescinded, the Department returns to the ordinary position: a request under Section 6, a decision under Section 7, and refusal only where a specific clause of Section 8 applies to the specific information sought.

Update, September 29: Section 24(5), and the Commission That Hears the Appeals

• There is a further requirement the withdrawn order did not meet. Section 24(5) of the Act obliges the State to place the notification made under Section 24(4) before the State legislature, so the exemption is not purely an executive act.
• The timing shows how the order worked in practice. It was issued on 21 September and reached the public domain only on 27 September, yet the department's designated authorities had begun citing it to refuse information from 22 September.
• The wider objection is that the Act already provides for secrecy. Section 8 carries a long list of grounds on which disclosure may be refused, which is why an exemption of a whole department was read as going beyond what the statute needs.
• The body that would hear an appeal against such a refusal is itself short staffed. The Tamil Nadu State Information Commission works with half of its sanctioned strength of eight Information Commissioners and has no Chief Information Commissioner.
• A civil society report card for 2024-25 recorded a backlog of over 41,000 appeals and complaints pending before that Commission as of June of the previous year, so a refusal can outlast the information's usefulness.
• A separate concern has been raised about the Digital Personal Data Protection Act diluting the right to information, since a wider definition of personal data can be used to withhold records that name an official.

Update, October 12: Twenty One Years of the Act, and the Duty That Needs No Application

• The Right to Information Act completed 21 years. Alongside the right to ask, the Act carries a duty that runs the other way: Section 4(1)(b) requires every public authority to publish, on its own motion and at regular intervals, 16 categories of information, from the contact details of officials to budgetary expenditure, so that a citizen need not file an application for basic facts at all.
• The Department of Personnel and Training has added guidelines for eight broader categories, covering procurement, public private partnerships and every RTI application a department receives. To make the duty enforceable, third party transparency audits are compulsory and the audit report must go to the Central Information Commission.
• The compliance record is the finding. The Commission's 2024-25 annual report shows that of 2,303 registered public authorities only 1,446 filed an audit report, which is 62.7 per cent; of those, more than half scored Grade C or below, meaning 80 per cent or less in the audit, while Grade E is below 60 per cent.
• A verification of the 94 departments under which these authorities fall found audit reports for 2024-25 on only 33 websites, and 56 of the 94, or 62 per cent, complying with the disclosure requirement on most categories with information from 2025-26; 26 carried none of it.
• Compliance is improving even so, from 754 submissions in 2020-21 to 1,443 in 2024-25. The consequence of Section 4 working is not only transparency: an application that need never be filed cannot pile up in appeal, so pendency at the Central and State Information Commissions falls.