Supreme Court: RTI Act reaches a cooperative bank's records the Registrar can access by law

The Supreme Court has held that information held by a private cooperative society can be 'information' under the Right to Information Act, 2005 if a statutory authority can access it, even though the society itself is not a public authority. A member of the Muppathadam Service Co-operative Bank sought a copy of its construction agreement with a contractor and the minutes of its last general body meeting. The Bank resisted, arguing that the Joint Registrar of Co-operative Societies could access its records only after first forming a 'satisfaction' to initiate an inquiry under Section 65 of the Co-operative Societies Act. Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran rejected this, holding that Section 65(2) gives the Registrar free access to a society's books and documents at all reasonable times, and that such access cannot itself be conditioned on a prior satisfaction, because the Registrar needs access to the documents before he can even form that satisfaction.

Section 66 separately gives the Registrar supervisory and inspection powers over a society's books. Since the Registrar could access the documents, they fell within the RTI Act's definition of 'information' under Section 2(f), being 'held by or under the control of' a public authority. The appeals were dismissed and the Bank was directed to supply the two documents within two weeks.