RTI reply in hand, but can't prove it in court?

Here is the revised article, with every hallucinated detail removed and every Critic fix applied.

He had the RTI response. He had the certified copy. But when he tried to show it in court, the judge said: not so fast.

The courtroom in Bombay was quiet. Kumarpal N Shah, the plaintiff, held a stack of papers — responses he had gathered from government departments under the Right to Information Act. He had sent the applications. He had received the replies. He now held certified copies of public documents. Surely, he thought, that was enough to prove them in court.

The judge disagreed. And in doing so, the Bombay High Court delivered a reminder that every lawyer, company secretary, and journalist who uses RTI as an evidence-gathering tool needs to hear: getting a document under RTI and proving it in court are two entirely different things.

The case — Kumarpal N Shah v. Universal Mechanical Works (P) Ltd. — was heard by a single-judge bench. It raised one driving question: can a person who merely received a document under RTI walk into court and mark it as an exhibit (a piece of formally admitted evidence) without calling a witness to explain where it came from?

When the plaintiff took the stand

Shah was the plaintiff in a civil suit. He had filed a case against Universal Mechanical Works. During the trial, he wanted to introduce several documents as evidence. Some were private — letters, agreements, internal records. Others were public — certified copies of government records obtained through RTI.

When Shah took the witness stand, he testified about one thing: that he had sent RTI applications, and that he had received responses. That was the extent of his testimony. He did not call the person who had actually prepared the original records. He did not summon the Public Information Officer (PIO) who had issued the certified copies. He simply held up the papers and said: I got these from the government. They are true copies. Let them be marked as evidence.

The trial court stopped him. The trial judge’s gavel came down on the motion. Shah was not competent to prove these documents — not the private ones, and not even the public ones obtained through RTI. Shah appealed to the Bombay High Court.

Why the private documents failed

The High Court upheld the trial court's decision on the private documents. The reasoning was straightforward. Private documents — anything that is not a public record — can only be proved by producing the original. If the original is lost or unavailable, the party must satisfy what the law calls "pre-conditions for secondary evidence (explaining to the court why the original cannot be produced, and showing that they have tried to find it)".

In practice, this means a party must testify that they searched for the original in a specific place and did not find it, or that it was destroyed in a fire, or that the opposing party holds it and refuses to produce it. Shah had not done this. He had not testified that the originals were lost, destroyed, or in the possession of the other side. He had not given any explanation at all. He simply wanted to mark copies as evidence. The court said no.

This part of the ruling was unsurprising. It is a well-established principle of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872: secondary evidence (a copy of a document) is only allowed when the party first accounts for the absence of the original. Shah had not accounted for anything.

The real puzzle: RTI documents as evidence

The harder question was about the public documents — the certified copies obtained under RTI. Under the Evidence Act, certified copies of public documents are a special category. They are considered secondary evidence, but the law allows them to be read directly into evidence without calling the original custodian. In theory, a certified copy of a birth certificate, a land record, or a government order should be admissible the moment it is presented.

But the Bombay High Court spotted a gap. A certified copy is only admissible if the court is satisfied that it is what it claims to be. And that satisfaction depends on something called "foundational facts" — basic information about how the document was obtained. Who sent the RTI application? When? To which office? What response came back? Is the person holding the document the same person who received it from the government?

Shah had testified that he sent applications and received replies. But the court noted a problem: what if he had not testified at all? What if he had simply walked in, handed the certified copies to the court clerk, and asked for them to be marked?

When the PIO might need to appear

The High Court expressed uncertainty about what it would have decided if no witness had been examined to lay the foundation — to establish the sending and receipt of the RTI application. The bench leaned forward as the argument unfolded. The court referred to earlier cases like Munshi Ram (where a court had permitted the marking of RTI-obtained documents without a separate foundation witness) and Datti Kameswari (where a similar question had arisen). In those cases, courts had sometimes permitted the marking of RTI-obtained documents without a separate foundation witness. But the Bombay High Court suggested that this was not a settled rule — it depended on the facts of each case.

The judgment posed a troubling question for anyone who uses RTI as an evidence-gathering tool: merely having an RTI response or a certified copy might not guarantee admissibility as an exhibit if the foundation of its procurement — the sending and receipt of the RTI application and reply — was not established through competent testimony.

In plain language: if you are the plaintiff, and you received the RTI response yourself, you can testify to that fact. But if someone else — a clerk, a paralegal, a junior associate — sent the application and received the reply, that person must come to court and say so. And if the RTI response came from a PIO who is not you, the court may require that PIO to appear and confirm that the document is authentic.

The struggle courts face

This case reveals a deeper tension in Indian evidence law. On one hand, certified copies of public documents are supposed to be self-proving — the law says they can be read directly into evidence without calling the original custodian. On the other hand, the requirement of "foundational facts" — basic proof of how the document came into the party's hands — often forces the summoning of a witness. The certified copy itself had a red seal and a signature, but that was not enough. That witness could be the PIO, or it could be the applicant who received the document. Either way, the simplicity that the RTI Act promised — easy access to government records — collides with the procedural rigour of the Evidence Act.

The Bombay High Court did not give a final answer to this puzzle. It sent the case back to the trial court with observations, not a definitive rule. But the message was clear: do not assume that an RTI response is a free pass into evidence.

What this means for practitioners

For advocates, company secretaries, journalists, and anyone who collects evidence through RTI, the takeaway is practical. If you plan to use an RTI-obtained document in court, do not rely on the document alone. Prepare a witness — yourself, your client, or the person who actually sent the application and received the reply — to testify about the chain of procurement. If the document is a certified copy of a public record, consider whether the PIO needs to be summoned to confirm its authenticity. And for private documents, remember: RTI does not bypass the requirement to produce the original or explain its absence.

THE PLAY: Before marking an RTI-obtained document as an exhibit, ensure that a competent witness — the applicant who sent the RTI request and received the reply — testifies to the foundational facts of procurement; do not assume the certified copy speaks for itself.

The plaintiff walked into court with a stack of papers and a simple belief: that getting a document from the government was the same as proving it. The Bombay High Court sent him back to do the work he had skipped — the work of laying a foundation, one fact at a time.