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About the Instructor — CPD Course

About Dr. Shrawan Kumar Pathak — editor of RTI Wiki and instructor of the PIO / FAA CPD course.

Part of the PIO / FAA CPD Course.

Dr. Shrawan Kumar Pathak — Instructor

Editor of RTI Wiki, a plain-language reference on the RTI Act, 2005, with a long-running focus on PIO and First Appellate Authority drafting practice.

Practice

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

Teaching

  • Editorial lead for the PIO / FAA knowledge base, covering the §8(1) clauses and §19 procedure.
  • Author of the “Ask for records, not answers” drafting framework.
  • Co-ordinator of the planned quarterly editorial review.

Editorial

  • Editor, RTI Wiki.
  • Lead author of the post-DPDP-2025 framework pages on §8(1)(j) and §8(2).
  • Maintainer of the reference corpus that grounds articles on this site.

Writing

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.

Contact

Editorial board (forming)

We are forming an independent editorial review panel of experienced RTI practitioners to co-review course content. We're actively onboarding — see Editorial Review — reviewer onboarding.

Why this course, from this instructor

The gap is not in the Act. The Act is well-drafted — and the Supreme Court has done excellent work clarifying it over the 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 years of reading PIO orders that say “§8(1)(d) applies — request rejected” (and watching the FAA overturn many of them), that is what I believe is worth teaching.

Last reviewed: 21 April 2026.

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