Which one of the following statements is true about the right to information?

Concept — a right is named after its source. A constitutional right draws its force from the Constitution itself, whether from a provision written into its text or from a facet the courts have read into one, and it cannot be taken away by ordinary legislation. A legal (statutory) right is one that a legislature creates by an ordinary law, which also lays down the procedure and appeal machinery for enforcing it and which that same legislature can amend or repeal by ordinary law. “Political” and “social” belong to a different axis altogether: they describe the sphere in which a right operates, not the source it comes from.

Applying it to the right to information. The right that a citizen in India actually files and enforces is conferred by the Right to Information Act, 2005 — an ordinary Act of Parliament. The Bill was passed by Parliament in May 2005, received the President’s assent on 15 June 2005, and the Act came into force on 12 October 2005, a few provisions having commenced at once upon enactment. The Act itself defines the right and supplies the whole enforcement structure:

• section 2(j) sets out what information the right covers, and section 3 confers that right on every citizen;

• every public authority must designate a Public Information Officer to receive requests;

• information must ordinarily be supplied within 30 days, and within 48 hours where the life or liberty of a person is involved;

• a first appeal lies to a departmental appellate authority, and a second appeal to the Central Information Commission or the relevant State Information Commission.

The claimable entitlement, its scope, its exemptions and its appeal machinery are all created by an ordinary statute. So on the axis of source, the right to information is a legal right, and that is the statement which is true here.

Cross-check — take the statute away and see what is left. It is section 3 that lets a citizen demand a particular document from a particular officer, and the Act that lets her appeal if it is refused. No provision of the Constitution creates that claim or that procedure, and Parliament can reshape the machinery by ordinary law, as it did through the Right to Information (Amendment) Act, 2019, which revised the tenure and service conditions of the Information Commissioners. An entitlement that an ordinary legislature creates and can reshape in this way is statutory in its source.

Why the other classifications do not fit.

• Constitutional: no provision of the Constitution confers a right to information. The Supreme Court has held that a right to know is implicit in the freedom of speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a), in State of Uttar Pradesh v. Raj Narain, 1975 and S.P. Gupta, 1981, so the idea does have a genuine constitutional dimension. But that is a facet read into a fundamental right by the courts, not a right the Constitution’s text confers, and it is not what gives a citizen the enforceable claim-and-appeal procedure; on the source axis this question uses, that procedure comes from the 2005 Act.

• Political: political rights concern a citizen’s participation in the exercise of state power, such as voting, contesting an election, and forming or joining a political party.

• Social: social rights concern a person’s welfare and standing within society, such as claims to education, health care and social security.

Answer: the right to information is a legal right.