How to file an RTI in Tamil Nadu — and what to do when they do not reply

Sample story — delete this file once your own reports are up.

Most people who give up on the Right to Information Act give up at the same place: the silence after the first application. That silence is not the end of the process. It is a specific stage of it, with a specific remedy, and the remedy is free.

Filing it

1. Write it on plain paper. There is no official form for Tamil Nadu. A sheet of paper works.
2. Address it to the Public Information Officer of the office that holds the record — the panchayat, the municipality, the highways division, whichever one would physically have the file.
3. Ask for records, not opinions. "Why is the road bad?" gets you nothing. "Copy of the work order, estimate, and completion certificate for road work in survey number X between January 2024 and December 2025" gets you a file.
4. Pay ₹10. By court fee stamp, postal order, or cash against receipt. If you hold a BPL card, you pay nothing.
5. Send it by registered post with acknowledgement due. Keep the receipt. That receipt is what starts the clock.

The clock

• The office has 30 days to reply.
• If the information concerns someone's life or liberty: 48 hours.
• If they say nothing at all by day 31, that counts in law as a refusal. This is the part most people do not know.

The appeal nobody uses

Within 30 days of that deemed refusal, you write a First Appeal to the First Appellate Authority — usually the officer one rank above the PIO in the same office. It costs nothing. You attach a copy of your original application and the postal receipt, and you state one line: no reply was received within the statutory period.

A very large share of applications that go unanswered are answered within weeks of a first appeal landing, because the appeal creates a record that a senior officer has to close.

If the first appeal also fails, a Second Appeal goes to the Tamil Nadu Information Commission. That is slower — often a year or more — but it is also free, and the Commission can impose a penalty on the officer personally.

The Act works less because officials fear the Commission, and more because they dislike paperwork that names them.

What to keep

Keep everything: the application copy, the postal receipt, the acknowledgement card, every reply. If a story ever comes out of it, that paper trail is what makes it publishable.