Srinagar: The Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh high court has put the administration on notice after a transparency activist alleged that the appeals under the Right To Information Act were taking years for disposal in the Union Territory. A division bench of J&K Chief Justice Arun Palli and Justice Rajnesh Oswal adjourned the case on Tuesday (February 10) after the deputy solicitor general T.M. Shamshi prayed for time “to ascertain as to why the appeals that were preferred under the RTI Act 2005 years ago have not been heard once and decided”. After hearing Shamshi, the court deferred the matter for hearing on February 23. Some 600 second appeals under the RTI Act related to Jammu and Kashmir are pending in the Central Information Commission (CIC), Rashmi Chowdhary, secretary CIC noted in a letter to Jammu and Kashmir chief secretary Atal Dulloo on January 12.“Your kind cooperation is solicited in the matter so that hearings are conducted smoothly,” Chowdhary’s letter, a copy of which is with The Wire, states.In a petition before the high court, activist Junaid Javid, a resident of north Kashmir’s Baramulla district, sought directions for implementing the RTI Act “in letter and spirit” in Jammu and Kashmir.Javid alleged that a number of RTI applications and first appeals were pending before different public authorities in J&K and the CIC, which have not been decided within the timeframe stipulated by the law.The activist’s counsel Naveed Bukhtiyar told the court that after being dissatisfied with the responses of the first appellate authorities, the petitioner filed second appeals before the CIC regarding three RTI applications dated November 13, 2024, January 9, 2025 and November 27, 2025. “From more than five months, the CIC has been sleeping over the appeal and is neither is listing the case for hearing nor passing any order,” the petitioner told the court. Bukhtiyar also referred to a complaint by another lawyer Mueed-ul-Islam who has filed “multiple application” including one with the J&K high court under the RTI Act. “However, even after the passing of the thirty days, [the] applicant is yet to receive the information or any response,” he said.When Article 370 was in force, the erstwhile state had its own J&K RTI Act 2009 under which it was mandatory for a public authority to respond to an RTI application within 30 days. The first appellate authority was supposed to decide an appeal within 45 days and the state information commission had to decide the second appeal within 120 days.However, after the reading down of Article 370, J&K is governed by the central RTI Act wherein the second appeals are decided by the CIC without any timeline. “The government has used this clause to prolong the sharing or information or deny it entirely without letting the applicant know,” Bukhtiyar told The Wire.Citing the judgements of the Supreme Court, Kolkata high court and others, Bukhtiyar informed the court: “The appeals of J&K are taking years to get listed which is actually a violation the fundamental right under article 19, 21 and even the principal of natural justice, that is right to fair hearing.”He underlined that there have been “repeated complaints” by the citizens of Jammu and Kashmir who are allegedly suffering “due to late replies or by the cumbersome procedure of second appeals”. “What is worth mentioning is that not a single penny has been spent by the government of India for the awareness of the RTI Act since 2019,” the petition stated, while accusing the government of violating Section 26 of the act.Section 26 makes it mandatory for the Union government to organise awareness programmes and train public authorities among other issues related to the RTI Act subject “to the extent of availability of financial and other resources”. The petitioner urged the high court to pass a writ of mandamus directing the respondents to decide the pending appeals, adopt the established norms to decide the second appeals and file a compliance report on the implementation of the act in Jammu and Kashmir. On January 15, the J&K administration directed all the central public information officers to ensure that all RTI applications, including those received offline, were uploaded on the Union Territory’s Online RTI Portal.After Article 370 was read down, a Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative study found that there was a 31.44% decline in RTI applications filed in Jammu and Kashmir in 2021-22 from 1603 to 1099.