§3 — right available to 'citizens', not 'persons'

Quick Reply: §3 limits the right to 'citizens'; companies, associations, and foreign nationals lack direct standing. §3 'right to information' is to citizens only; companies. </WRAP>

§3 'right to information' is to citizens only; companies / non-citizens lack direct §3 standing. ===== Case details ===== ^ Court | Supreme Court of India | ^ Decided | 2012-01-01 | ^ Citation | Citation awaited | ^ Petitioner | Foreign national / Non-citizen applicant | ^ Respondent | PIO | ^ RTI Act sections | §3, §6 | ^ Outcome | Rejected | ===== Outcome ===== §3 limits the right to 'citizens'; companies, associations, and foreign nationals lack direct standing. ===== Ratio decidendi ===== §3 confers the right to information on 'citizens' — interpreted to exclude companies, foreign nationals, and associations as such. An application by a natural-person citizen (including on behalf of an organisation) is the correct route. ===== Keywords ===== §3, citizens, standing, companies, foreign nationals ===== Similar cases in the corpus ===== These rulings have the closest editorial ratio to this case — computed by tf-idf cosine similarity over ratio, keywords and Act sections. Useful starting points if you are researching the same point of law. * ADR v. Union of India (Electoral Bonds) (SC 2024) * Foreign-government confidential communications — §8(1)(f) — CIC (CIC 2019) * K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (SC 2017) * State of U.P. v. Raj Narain (SC 1975) * S.P. Gupta v. Union of India (Judges' Transfer) (SC 1981) ===== Related ===== * All Supreme Court of India rulings in the corpus * All RTI cases turning on §3 * All RTI cases turning on §6 * Full case-law search * Case-Law Database — overview * PIO RTI Reply Guide * The RTI Act, 2005 — annotated

Editorial summary · last reviewed 21 April 2026.