Did Modi-era laws weaken citizens’ power to question government? RTI changes, PM CARES and bail examined

What does it mean for a government to empower citizens? In a May 2026 Round Table Studio Instagram reel, a commentator challenges the Modi government to name a law that has strengthened ordinary people’s ability to question those in power. He argues instead that access to information, freedom to speak and the ability to secure bail have been weakened. He points to the Right to Information (RTI) law, the PM CARES Fund and international rankings.

The most important part of his argument is not the demand for a single universally popular law. It is whether citizens can obtain official records, challenge decisions and retain their liberty when the state uses its powers. On that question, the documentary record reveals genuine setbacks to information access, alongside important legal protections and distinctions that the reel leaves out.

What changed in the Right to Information law?

India’s Right to Information Act, 2005 gives citizens a route to ask public authorities for records, subject to exemptions and appeals. It was enacted well before the Modi government. A major change in 2019 gave the Union government power to prescribe the tenure and service conditions of central and state information commissioners, replacing tenure and pay provisions previously fixed directly in the law. That change raised a substantive concern about the independence of officials who decide disputes involving government departments. It did not abolish citizens’ right to file RTI requests.

A more direct restriction followed from the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. Section 44(3), brought into force on 13 November 2025, replaced RTI Act section 8(1)(j) with a shorter exemption for information relating to personal information. The earlier wording contained express tests concerning public activity, unwarranted intrusion into privacy and the larger public interest. Transparency advocates argue that the replacement gives authorities more room to withhold records about public officials and official decisions. The government presents data protection as a privacy safeguard. The amendment’s text is established; its constitutionality and precise application are contested, and legal challenges have followed.

Privacy is a legitimate right, especially for people whose personal details have little to do with public spending or state decisions. But a broad exemption is difficult to justify when officials can use it to shield information needed to expose wrongdoing. A proportionate approach would protect genuinely private details while allowing disclosure of records whose public interest outweighs the privacy intrusion, with independent review of refusals. The 2025 change makes that balance harder to see in the wording of the specific exemption. This is a real transparency setback, not proof that RTI itself has ceased to exist.

PM CARES: a public-facing fund and an unsettled accountability dispute

The PM CARES Fund was established in 2020 as a public charitable trust associated with the Prime Minister and other senior officeholders. The Prime Minister’s Office has argued in litigation that the fund is not a public authority under the RTI Act. That position is not the same as a final judicial finding that nobody can question the fund or that its finances have no oversight. The fund has published financial statements and audit information, but the extent of enforceable access to records remains a distinct transparency question.

In January 2026, proceedings before the Delhi High Court concerning disclosure of information held by income-tax authorities also raised the fund’s entitlement to third-party privacy protections. The legal dispute shows that government association, charitable-trust status, disclosure obligations and third-party confidentiality cannot simply be collapsed into one claim that there is ‘no accountability’. Nevertheless, when a fund receives public contributions in the Prime Minister’s name, effective access to reliable accounts and reasoned scrutiny is an important democratic expectation. Voluntary publication alone cannot replace a clear answer about legally enforceable disclosure.

Has the right to bail disappeared?

No. The reel’s assertion about bail is too general. Bail is governed by several provisions and varies by offence, stage of proceedings and applicable special law. Section 479 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita provides release protections for eligible undertrial prisoners after specified periods in detention, including a one-third threshold for certain first-time offenders. It also contains important exceptions, including for multiple pending offences or cases. The Supreme Court has continued to examine how these protections operate.

Severe restrictions on bail in particular laws, prolonged pre-trial detention and delays in hearing cases remain legitimate matters of concern. But such problems must be tied to specific statutes and evidence; they do not show that ordinary bail rights have been removed altogether. Keeping someone in prison without a timely, fair examination of whether detention is necessary can be unjust even where an arrest or a charge is lawful. That judgment is about due process and proportionality, not an assertion that every detention is illegal.

What do democracy and press-freedom rankings establish?

Reporters Without Borders placed India 157th among 180 countries and territories in its 2026 World Press Freedom Index, compared with 151st in 2025. Its index uses documented abuses and expert assessments of political, economic, legal, social and safety conditions for journalism. That ranking provides relevant comparative evidence of pressure on press freedom, but it is not a court verdict on every law or a measurement of RTI rights alone. Democracy indices likewise rely on particular definitions, indicators and expert judgments; different rankings should not be combined into a single undifferentiated claim of national decline.

Nor does a press-freedom ranking prove the speaker’s further allegation that India falsifies its statistics. That accusation would require separate evidence about the particular dataset and manipulation alleged. Poverty and human-development measures also concern different things from legal accountability.

Do these policies empower citizens?

There are counterexamples to the claim that the government has passed only laws that take power away. The Jan Vishwas legislation, including changes passed in April 2026, seeks to replace criminal punishment for numerous minor regulatory breaches with civil penalties or lighter processes. The government argues that this reduces unnecessary criminal exposure for people and businesses. Whether each amendment works fairly in practice requires examination; regulatory relief also does not answer whether people can demand government records.

This distinction matters. An administration may simplify rules in one area while restricting scrutiny in another. An overall claim that no citizen-benefiting law exists is therefore unsustainable; so is the opposite assertion that economic or administrative reforms cancel out an erosion of public oversight. The appropriate questions are what each change does, whom it affects and what safeguards exist.

Where the evidence leads

The reel identifies a consequential democratic problem: the public’s ability to question power depends on enforceable information access, independent decisions on disclosure and meaningful remedies. The 2019 RTI institutional changes and the 2025 personal-information exemption supply concrete grounds to criticise a weakening of transparency safeguards. The continuing PM CARES disputes show why public-facing institutions need clear, independently reviewable disclosure rules.

But the reel overstates its case when it suggests that questioning government or obtaining bail has generally ceased to be a legal right, treats distinct international indices as interchangeable, or implies statistical fraud without specific evidence. These overstatements are not necessary to reach the strongest justified conclusion: weakening mechanisms that let citizens inspect government decisions is harmful to democratic accountability, even while other rights and some citizen-benefiting reforms remain in force. The practical test of empowerment is not the government’s description of a law but whether citizens can use it to get information, challenge power and obtain fair treatment.