RTI for income certificate in Assam: full guide

This is the state-specific guide for Assam only. If you want the all-India template, decision tree, and the legal reasoning behind each step, start with the parent page RTI for income certificate delay and come back here for the office names, the Assam portal, the fee, and where the Assam Information Commission sits. Every fact on this page was checked against an official Assam government source in July 2026.

An Assam income certificate is the key that unlocks a large slice of state and central welfare. Without it, families in Kamrup, Nalbari, Barpeta, Dhubri, or the tea-garden districts of Upper Assam regularly lose out on benefits that can run into tens of thousands of rupees a year. The Sewa Setu portal of the Government of Assam lists the Application for Income Certificate as a citizen service under the Revenue and Disaster Management Department, alongside land records services like certified copies of Jamabandi and mutation. That tells you two things: the certificate is treated as a revenue-side document, and the file lives in your revenue circle, not in some far-off directorate.

The certificate is the gateway to schemes you will recognise from the Sewa Setu homepage itself: the Mukhya Mantri Loksevak Arogya Yojana (MMLSAY) health scheme, the Anundoram Borooah Cash Award Scheme (ARBAS) for students, the National Means-cum-Merit Scholarship, post-matric and combined merit scholarships, EWS reservations, and central schemes such as PMAY and Ayushman Bharat where the state nodal verifies income. When the certificate is delayed, every one of those applications stalls with it, and that is exactly when an RTI moves the file. For the wider India-wide picture of which schemes hinge on this document, see the parent guide.

In Assam the income certificate is issued by the Revenue Circle Office. The designated officer is the Circle Officer (also called the Circle Officer, Revenue Circle, or in some circles the Assistant Commissioner attached to the circle). The Circle Officer reports upward to the Deputy Commissioner (DC) of the district. Practically, this means two things for your RTI.

First, your application file, the verifying documents, the field inquiry report (often through the Lot Mandal or Mouzadar), and the signed certificate all sit inside the revenue circle that covers your village or ward — not at the state secretariat, not at Janata Bhawan, and not with the Revenue and Disaster Management Department headquarters. The department only frames policy; the circle does the work. Second, when you file an RTI, you must name the correct circle in the application. The Assam RTI online portal lets you drill down Department → District → Public Authority, so you can pick Revenue Department → your District → Circle Office, [your circle] and land your RTI directly on the desk of the SPIO for that circle.

If you are not sure which circle covers your address, the Deputy Commissioner's office of your district is the safe fallback, because the DC is the appellate authority above the Circle Officer and will redirect a misdirected RTI under section 6(3) of the Act. The Sewa Setu portal also confirms the structure: the official login types listed are Deputy Commissioners Office, Circle Office, and Others — so the circle is the recognised unit of service delivery. For cross-state context on how Assam compares, see how income-certificate RTIs work across all states.

Assam is one of the states that does run a working online RTI portal, so you have a choice between online and postal filing.

Option A: Online on rtionline.assam.gov.in. Open https://rtionline.assam.gov.in/ and click New RTI Request. Read the guidelines, tick the acknowledgement box, enter your mobile number and email, then in the form pick Department → District → Public Authority/Office so that the application lands on your Circle Office. Type your section 6(1) questions, attach supporting documents in PDF, pay Rs. 10 by Net Banking through the Assam eGRAS gateway, and submit. You will get an RTI registration number on screen and by SMS and email. Track it any time from the homepage under View Request Status. You can prepare your questions first in the AI RTI draft app and paste them in.

Option B: By Speed Post. Address the application to the SPIO, Office of the Circle Officer, [name of Revenue Circle], [district], Assam, with a covering fee of Rs. 10. Keep the Speed Post tracking slip — it is your proof of receipt and the 30-day clock starts the day the circle signs for the cover.

Option C: Hand delivery. You can also submit a paper application at the Circle Office counter and insist on a stamped receiving with the date and the name of the official who took it.

The portal's own FAQ confirms that an RTI filed online carries the same 30-day liability as a paper one. BPL applicants skip the fee entirely by uploading BPL proof. Across the three routes, the RTI timeline calculator will tell you exactly when the 30-day, First Appeal, and Second Appeal deadlines fall once you feed in the date of filing.

The Assam RTI fee is Rs. 10 per application for general applicants and nil for BPL applicants with valid proof. The portal FAQ states this verbatim: a payment of Rs. 10 is required for successful submission, and “Payment is not required if the RTI applicant belongs to the Below Poverty Line (BPL) category,” with documents and details required as proof. The First Appeal filed online is free — no second fee is charged.

For online filers, payment goes through Net Banking via the Assam eGRAS (assamegras.gov.in) payment gateway, which the portal's own content-security policy lists as the form-action endpoint. A printable Payment Receipt is generated after a successful transaction; keep it, because the SPIO sometimes claims non-receipt and the receipt is the fastest way to close that argument.

For postal filers, attach the prescribed Rs. 10 fee in the mode the public authority accepts, addressed to the SPIO. Compare the fee across states on our RTI fees by state page, and read the wider rules context on the RTI Act page. For general advice on BPL fee waiver across states, see the parent income-certificate guide.

The single biggest mistake citizens make in Assam is to write “give me the status of my income certificate” — which lets the SPIO reply “your application is under process” and close the file. Strong RTI questions force specific, dated, name-level answers that the circle cannot brush off. Use section 6(1) of the RTI Act 2005 to ask, and section 7(1) to demand a reply in 30 days.

Five questions that work for an Assam income certificate file:

1. Daily progress. Furnish the daily progress of my application number [ABC/2026/1234] submitted on [date] at the Circle Office, [circle name], [district], including the dates of receipt, document verification, field inquiry by the Lot Mandal or Mouzadar, and signing by the Circle Officer.
2. Pending with whom. State the name, designation, and office address of the officer with whom the file is currently lying pending, and the exact reason for the delay beyond the stipulated service period.
3. Stipulated time and current pendency. Provide the stipulated service delivery period for an income certificate under the Assam Right to Public Services framework and the total number of days that have elapsed on my application so far.
4. Inquiry status. Furnish a certified copy of the field inquiry report (Mouzadar or Lot Mandal report) and the verification note prepared in connection with my application.
5. Action against the official. If any official is responsible for the inordinate delay, state the action taken or proposed against that official under the relevant service rules, and the date by which my certificate will be issued.

These questions are sharper than a vague status request because each one demands a dated, named, documentary answer. Draft all five in minutes with the AI RTI draft app, and run any SPIO reply through the PIO reply checker to see whether the reply actually answers each question or evades it.

If the 30-day window passes with no reply, or the SPIO's reply is evasive, false, or partial, your next step is the First Appeal under section 19(1) of the RTI Act 2005. The appeal goes to the First Appellate Authority (FAA), who is ordinarily one rung above the SPIO — for a Circle Officer SPIO, the FAA is typically the Additional Deputy Commissioner or Deputy Commissioner of the district. The Assam portal FAQ confirms that you can file the First Appeal online from the same rtionline.assam.gov.in homepage using the First Appeal Request button, that no fee is charged for it, and that you can apply after the SPIO disposes the request or after 30 days of silence.

The conventional window to file a First Appeal is within 30 days of the SPIO's reply (or of the day the 30-day reply period expired), and the FAA is expected to dispose of it within 30 days of receipt, extendable by 15 days with recorded reasons. Build the appeal around the same five questions and add one line: “the SPIO has not provided the information sought within the period stipulated under section 7(1), and the deprivation is appealed under section 19(1).” You can draft the appeal directly in the First Appeal app. For the broader statutory framing, see the RTI Act page and the case-law digest.

When the FAA is also silent or sides with the SPIO, your final RTI remedy is the Second Appeal under section 19(3) of the Act, filed before the Assam Information Commission (AIC). Section 19(3) gives you 90 days from the date you learned or should have learned of the FAA decision (with a further 30-day condonable window if you can show sufficient cause). The AIC also takes complaints under section 18(1) — useful when there is no SPIO designated, no FAA reachable, or the fee was refused.

You can file the Second Appeal online from the rtionline.assam.gov.in homepage using the Second Appeal Request button, which routes you to the Commission's own portal at https://sic.assam.gov.in/public/second_appeal.jsp. The AIC portal requires you to state whether the petition is a complaint under section 18(1) or a second appeal under section 19(3), name the SPIO and FAA, upload the RTI application, the First Appeal, the FAA order, and a valid ID proof, and submit. The AIC's listed guidelines add that you must also send hard copies of all documents by post to the Commission for verification — the online submission is the registration, the postal set is the file.

This two-track requirement is the single most-forgotten step in Assam second appeals: filers stop at the online acknowledgement and never send the printed bundle, then wonder why the matter is never listed. Always print the acknowledgement, attach the printouts, and Speed Post the set to the AIC address below. The Awaaz RTI tool helps you raise a public, searchable voice escalation in parallel.

The Assam Information Commission is the second-appellate body for every RTI filed against a public authority of the Government of Assam. Its contact details, taken verbatim from the official RTI Assam contact page, are:

Phone numbers and the email are reproduced exactly as shown on the official rtionline.assam.gov.in contact page; do not infer a second number. The portal also carries a Handbook for Appellants under the same menu, which is the Commission's own guide to filing first and second appeals in Assam and is worth a read before you file.

The most common reasons an Assam income certificate file sits unattended are not unique to Assam, but they show up in a recognisable pattern here. Knowing the pattern lets you write questions the circle cannot answer with a shrug.

When you frame questions this way, the SPIO either has to produce the document or admit on record that it does not exist — both of which strengthen your Second Appeal later. Pair each RTI with a parallel grievance on Sewa Setu under the Grievances tab so the Revenue Department's own redressal machinery is also looking at the file. The Sewa Setu helpline is 18003453574 (toll-free; the portal notes it can be temporarily unreachable, in which case write to [email protected]).

This composite example is drawn from the kind of cases that reach the Assam Information Commission; it is illustrative and unsourced, intended only to show how the steps fit together. Treat it as a worked example, not a reported case.

A resident of a revenue circle in Kamrup district applied for an income certificate on Sewa Setu in early spring to support his daughter's National Means-cum-Merit Scholarship form. Six weeks passed with no certificate. He filed an RTI on rtionline.assam.gov.in naming the SPIO of his Circle Office, paying Rs. 10 by Net Banking, and asking the five daily-progress questions above. The 30-day deadline passed with no reply. He filed a First Appeal online (free, same portal) against the FAA — the Additional Deputy Commissioner. The FAA ordered the Circle Officer to furnish the information, but the reply that arrived named no officer and produced no inquiry report. He then filed a Second Appeal online at sic.assam.gov.in, uploaded the RTI, the First Appeal, the FAA order, his Aadhaar as ID proof, and Speed-Posted the printed bundle to the AIC at Godapani Path. At hearing the Commission found the field inquiry had been completed but never uploaded, directed issuance of the certificate within two weeks, and recorded the delay against the circle. The certificate was issued; the scholarship application went in on time.

The lesson is not the outcome but the sequence: certificate stuck → RTI with five sharp questions → free online First Appeal → online Second Appeal plus the posted hard copy → hearing. Each rung is one click away on the same Assam portal. For the tools behind each step, see the draft app, the timeline calculator, and the First Appeal app.

Paste your name, address, and application number into the bracketed fields. File online on rtionline.assam.gov.in or print and Speed Post to the SPIO of your Circle Office.

To the State Public Information Officer,
Office of the Circle Officer,
[Name of Revenue Circle], [District], Assam.

Subject: Application under section 6(1) of the Right to Information Act, 2005.

Sir/Madam,

I, [full name], resident of [full address], PIN [code], district [district], Assam, hereby seek the following information under section 6(1) of the Right to Information Act, 2005, relating to my application for an income certificate bearing number [application number], submitted on [date] at this office.

The information sought is as follows:

1. Furnish the daily progress of my aforesaid application, including the dates of receipt, document verification, field inquiry by the Mouzadar or Lot Mandal, and signing of the certificate by the Circle Officer.

2. State the name, designation, and office address of the officer with whom the file is currently lying pending, and the exact reason for delay beyond the stipulated service period under the Assam Right to Public Services framework.

3. Provide the stipulated service delivery period for an income certificate and the total number of days that have elapsed on my application so far.

4. Furnish a certified copy of the field inquiry report and the verification note prepared in connection with my application.

5. If any official is responsible for the inordinate delay, state the action taken or proposed against that official and the date by which my income certificate will be issued.

I state that the information sought is not falling under any of the exemptions of section 8 and 9 of the Act. I am an Indian citizen. The required fee of Rs. 10 is paid online through the rtionline.assam.gov.in portal [registration number], and I request that the information be supplied to me in written/electronic form within the period stipulated under section 7(1) of the Act.

Place: [place]
Date: [date]

[Signature]
[Name]
[Address with PIN]
[Mobile]
[Email]

Keep the registration number from the portal as your proof. If the SPIO does not reply within 30 days, the same five questions become the spine of your First Appeal and, after that, your Second Appeal to the Assam Information Commission.

1. Day 0. File on rtionline.assam.gov.in; save the RTI registration number and payment receipt. Note your statutory deadlines in the timeline calculator.
2. Day 1-30. Check View Request Status weekly. If the SPIO asks for a BPL or Aadhaar detail, reply the same day.
3. Day 31. If no reply, file the First Appeal online (free). The FAA normally has 30 days, extendable by 15.
4. Day ~46-60. If the FAA is silent or unsatisfactory, prepare the Second Appeal bundle.
5. Within 90 days of the FAA decision. File the Second Appeal online at sic.assam.gov.in and Speed Post the hard copy to the AIC at Godapani Path, Guwahati 781037.
6. Parallel. Lodge a grievance on Sewa Setu under the Grievances tab, and a Central grievance on the income-certificate parent guide if central schemes are blocked.
7. If still stuck. Use the Awaaz RTI tool for a public escalation, and consider a section 18(1) complaint to the AIC alongside the section 19(3) appeal.

Yes. The official portal is https://rtionline.assam.gov.in/, run by the Administrative Reforms, Training, Pension and Public Grievances Department and maintained by the Assam Information Commission with NIC, Assam. You can file new RTI requests, First Appeals, and Second Appeals from the homepage. Verify the URL yourself before filing — the Second Appeal button routes you to https://sic.assam.gov.in/public/second_appeal.jsp, the Commission's own portal.

Rs. 10 per application for general applicants, and nil for BPL applicants who upload valid BPL proof. The fee is paid online through Net Banking via the Assam eGRAS (assamegras.gov.in) gateway. The First Appeal filed on the portal is free of charge.

For an income certificate, the SPIO is the State Public Information Officer of your Revenue Circle Office, ordinarily the Circle Officer. On the online portal you select Department → District → Public Authority to land the application on the right circle. If the correct circle is unclear, address the application to the SPIO, Office of the Deputy Commissioner, [district], Assam, who will redirect it under section 6(3).

30 days from the date the application is received by the public authority, under section 7(1) of the RTI Act 2005. If the request concerns the life or liberty of a person, the period is 48 hours. The Assam portal FAQ confirms the 30-day reply window.

File a First Appeal under section 19(1) — usually within 30 days of the SPIO's silence or reply. On the Assam portal, use the First Appeal Request button; it is free. The FAA for a Circle Officer SPIO is typically the Additional Deputy Commissioner or the Deputy Commissioner of the district. Draft the appeal with the First Appeal app.

Click Second Appeal Request on rtionline.assam.gov.in, which takes you to the Assam Information Commission's portal at sic.assam.gov.in/public/second_appeal.jsp. Upload the RTI application, the First Appeal, the FAA order, a valid ID proof, and state whether you are filing under section 18(1) (complaint) or section 19(3) (second appeal). Then Speed Post the hard copies to the AIC at Godapani Path, Guwahati 781037 — the AIC's guidelines require the printed bundle for verification.

Section 19(3) gives 90 days from the date you learned or should have learned of the FAA decision, with a further condonable window of up to 30 days if you can show sufficient cause. File as early as you can; do not wait until day 89.

Yes. The Assam portal FAQ states explicitly that no payment is required if the applicant belongs to the Below Poverty Line category, subject to submitting appropriate documents and details as proof. Upload the BPL ration card or BPL certificate on the portal.

Yes. Address it to the SPIO, Office of the Circle Officer, [circle], [district], Assam, attach the prescribed Rs. 10 fee in the accepted mode, and send it by Speed Post with acknowledgement due. Keep the postal slip — the postmaster's delivery date is your proof of receipt and the start of the 30-day clock.

At Godapani Path, Juripar, Panjabari, Behind P&TD Office, Guwahati 781037, per the official rtionline.assam.gov.in contact page. The helpdesk number is 0361-2337900 (09:30-18:00, working days) and the helpdesk email is [email protected]. Do not invent a second number.

No. The income certificate is applied for and issued on Sewa Setu at https://sewasetu.assam.gov.in/ under the Revenue and Disaster Management Department, not on the RTI portal. The RTI portal is only for seeking information about your stuck application. Sewa Setu services are also available on the UMANG mobile app.

Schemes listed on Sewa Setu that rely on income proof include the Mukhya Mantri Loksevak Arogya Yojana (MMLSAY), the Anundoram Borooah Cash Award Scheme (ARBAS), the National Means-cum-Merit Scholarship, the Combined Merit Scholarship for Post Graduate students, EWS reservation, and central schemes such as PMAY where the state verifies income. A delayed certificate can block all of these — which is exactly the leverage an RTI gives you.

You can ask about more than one application in a single RTI if they are with the same public authority, but each application should be identified by its own number, date, and circle. The fee stays Rs. 10. For multiple family members across different circles, file one RTI per circle to keep the SPIO accountable — mixing circles in one application lets each SPIO blame the other. Read more on structuring multi-applicant RTIs in the parent guide.

• RTI for income certificate — all-India parent guide
• All Assam state-scheme RTI guides
• RTI for income certificate across all states
• State RTI portals directory
• RTI fees by state
• RTI for Aadhaar update
• RTI for PMAY status
• The RTI Act 2005
• RTI case-law digest

• Right to Information Online Portal, Government of Assam (rtionline.assam.gov.in) — FAQ, First Appeal, Second Appeal, Contact Us pages, accessed July 2026.
• Assam Information Commission (sic.assam.gov.in) — Second Appeal page, guidelines under section 18(1) and 19(3).
• Sewa Setu, Government of Assam (sewasetu.assam.gov.in) — income certificate service listed under Revenue and Disaster Management; helpline 18003453574.
• Right to Information Act, 2005 — sections 6(1), 7(1), 18(1), 19(1), 19(3); see the Act.
• Assam eGRAS payment gateway (assamegras.gov.in) — listed in the rtionline.assam.gov.in content-security policy as the form-action endpoint for fee payment.