Income-tax returns are ‘personal information’ thus, making them out of bounds of the Right to Information (RTI) Act as disclosure of the same would amount to ‘unwarranted invasion of the privacy’ of an individual, the Supreme Court held in an important decision recently.
Clearing the air over disclosure of IT returns being accessible under the RTI Act, the apex court concurred with the decision of the Central Information Commission which had denied information sought regarding matters pertaining to service record and assets and liabilities of an Enforcement Officer in the Sub-Regional Office in Akola (now working in Madhya Pradesh).
Hearing an appeal filed by RTI applicant Girish Ramchandra Deshpande, the Bench comprising Justice K S Radhakrishnan and Justice Dipak Misra observed that information, as was sought in the RTI application, mostly found a place in the income tax returns, referring to details of assets and liabilities.
All such information qualified to be ‘personal’ and thus exempted from disclosure under the RTI Act, the court said in its order.
It was also pointed out that unless a larger public interest was justified, such details could not be made public under the Act. The Bench said: “The details disclosed by a person in his income tax returns are personal information which stand exempted from disclosure under clause (j) of Section 8(1) of the RTI Act.”
