About the Instructor — CPD Course

About Shrawan Pathak — 25 years in RTI practice and training, editor of RTI Wiki, instructor of the PIO / FAA CPD course.

Part of the PIO / FAA CPD Course.

Twenty-five years of RTI practice. Editor of RTI Wiki — India's most-cited plain-language reference on the RTI Act, 2005.

• Trained Public Information Officers and First Appellate Authorities in central ministries, state departments, police, municipal corporations, and PSUs across India.
• Drafted over 2,000 reasoned PIO orders and reviewed hundreds of First Appeals for departmental review teams.
• Advised vigilance offices on the §8(1)(h) boundary between investigation protection and transparency.
• Authored practitioner notes on every major post-2011 Supreme-Court RTI ruling.

• Editorial lead for the PIO / FAA knowledge base — 25+ articles covering every §8(1) clause and §19 procedure.
• Author of the “Ask for records, not answers” drafting framework used by a majority of civil-society RTI trainers.
• Co-ordinator of the upcoming quarterly editorial review with retired Information Commissioners and senior RTI advocates.

• Editor, RTI Wiki — operational since 2005.
• Sole author of the post-DPDP-2025 framework pages on §8(1)(j) and §8(2).
• Maintainer of the 410-page reference corpus that grounds every article on this site.

Regular contributor on RTI to practitioner newsletters, legal journals, and training academies. Style: plain English, statute-first, case-law-anchored, tested against real-world PIO and FAA cases.

• Email: [email protected]
• CPD-specific: [email protected] (coming soon)
• Editorial feedback: Corrections page

The CPD course is supported by an editorial board of retired Information Commissioners and senior RTI advocates. We're actively onboarding — see Editorial Review — reviewer onboarding. Board members co-review the course content quarterly.

The gap is not in the Act. The Act is well-drafted — and the Supreme Court has done excellent work clarifying it for twenty years. The gap is in everyday PIO drafting. A three-minute order on a routine RTI is the norm. A three-minute order that is *also* reasoned, clause-specific, and writ-proof is possible — if the officer has the mental muscle memory and the templates ready to hand.

This course gives you both. Not theory; muscle memory and templates. After 25 years of reading PIO orders that say “§8(1)(d) applies — request rejected” (and watching the FAA overturn every one of them), that is what I believe is worth teaching.

• CPD course landing
• Full curriculum
• How to start — free
• Certification
• RTI Wiki editor profile
• Editorial review panel

Last reviewed: 21 April 2026.