Filing an RTI Request in Nepal: Who to Ask, What to Write, How to Appeal

You do not need a lawyer, a press card or a contact inside the building to ask a government office in Nepal for a document it already holds. The procedure is written down and anyone can use it. What trips people up comes later: the silence, the half answer, the refusal letter with nothing on it but a signature.

One thing before the details. This is a guide to how the process works, not legal advice, and not a rate card. Fees, reply periods and appeal windows connected to this law have been touched more than once, and plenty of what circulates online was accurate when somebody wrote it and is not accurate now. So where a step involves a payment or a deadline, this piece explains the mechanism rather than quoting a number, and the closing section says where to confirm the rest.

Who can file an RTI request in Nepal

The right to information is a fundamental right under Nepal's constitution, and the Right to Information Act turns it into a working procedure. The forms and the wording are built around a citizen applicant. A Nepali citizen with a citizenship certificate is the straightforward case.

Foreign nationals, foreign-owned companies and informal groups that are not registered anywhere can hit a wall. An office may hand the request back and ask for a citizen applicant, and there is no reliable way to argue past that at the counter. If that is your situation, have a Nepali citizen sign as the applicant, describe the organisation or the group inside the body of the letter, and give a contact address and phone number that work inside Nepal. The document you are asking about does not change.

What a request can do, and what it cannot

A request asks a public body for records it already holds. Budgets, contract awards, attendance sheets, inspection reports, minutes of meetings. It is not an order to act. Nobody repairs a road because you filed one.

What it produces is paper. After a flood response in a district, residents might want the record of what relief was promised and where it went. Near a hydropower project, a community might want the environmental assessment. Neither request forces an outcome, but each one turns a vague official answer into a document you can quote, and enough of those in circulation change how offices behave.

Start with the definition of a public body

The Act only reaches the bodies it defines as public. Whether that covers local levels, constitutional bodies, government-owned companies or grant-funded organisations depends on what the definition names, not on what the law plainly seems to be aiming at. Read it before you write anything and match it against the organisation you have in mind. If a category is not named there, do not assume it is covered.

Inside a covered body your letter belongs to one post: the public information officer. Address the post rather than reception, and keep a copy of whatever you hand over. If you are unsure which tier of Nepal's three levels of government holds the record, start at the ward or municipal office, since that is where most local records sit.

When the office says there is no information officer

A couple of stalls happen early, and neither one ends the request.

The first is the shrug. The office says it has no information officer, or that nobody there handles RTI. A body covered by the Act is supposed to have designated one. Ask for the name and designation in writing, and say plainly that you are filing under the Act. If the letter still will not be accepted, send it by registered post to the head of the office, keep the receipt, and treat whatever silence follows as a refusal.

The second is being at the wrong door, where the body simply does not hold the record. You are not meant to start over from scratch. The Act expects an office that does not hold the information to say so and to point you to the body that does, forwarding the request where it can. Ask for that forwarding on paper with the date on it, then send the same letter to the correct body with the forwarding note attached. Keep your original filing date visible in the correspondence, because when you eventually have to explain how long you have waited, that is the date that counts.

Check what the body already publishes

Before filing, look at the office's website, notice board and annual report. The Act puts a standing duty on public bodies to publish and keep updated a defined set of their own information: their functions, structure, the laws they work under, budgets, decisions, and the contact details of the information officer. Some of it is up. Much of it is not, and that gap is worth naming in your request. If what you need falls inside that list, say so when you ask, and add a line asking why it is not already published.

How to file, step by step

1. Identify the office that actually holds the record, not the one that talks about it.
2. Write in Nepali. Many offices will accept an English letter, but that is not guaranteed, and you can ask for the reply in the language you filed in.
3. Be specific about the document, the period and the office.
4. File in person or by post, and get a date stamp, receipt or diary number before you leave, or before the envelope goes out.
5. Say what format you want: photocopies, a scan by email, or permission to sit with the register and read it.
6. Write the filing date in your own diary. Whatever clock the Act runs on, that date starts it.
7. Keep one clean copy of everything you sent, plus every receipt, in a single folder. An appeal file is only as good as the paper in it.

What to write: a request letter

This model works for almost any public body in Nepal. Keep it factual and save your arguments for an appeal.

Model request (adapt the facts)

Date: ................

To: The Public Information Officer
[Name of the public body and office], [Address]

Subject: Request for information under the
Right to Information Act

Dear Sir/Madam,

I request the following information held by your office:
1. ................
2. ................
3. ................

The period covered by this request is ........ to ........

I would prefer [photocopies / a scanned copy by email /
to inspect the file in person].

Please tell me the fee that applies, how to pay it, and the
date by which I can expect a reply.

Name, address, phone, email, signature, date: ................

What it costs, and how you pay

Here is the part that surprises people. The fee schedule sits in the Rules made under the Act rather than in the Act itself, and it covers two different things: a fee for filing the application, and a per-page charge when the office makes copies for you. Because those Rules have been revised over time, the amount an office quoted a few years ago may not be the amount today.

So do not carry a figure in your head to the counter. Ask the public information officer, in writing, what the current application fee is and what the copying rate is. Pay against an official receipt and keep that receipt with your copy of the request. If you are allowed to inspect a register instead of taking copies away, ask whether a copying charge applies at all, because reading is not the same as photocopying.

If the amount you are asked for looks wrong, ask the officer to show you the provision it comes from. Note the figure, the date and who told you, and pay under receipt anyway rather than walking away over a small sum. An unexplained charge, or a demand for cash with no receipt, is a clean point to raise in an appeal, and you cannot raise it later if you never recorded it.

The reply clock, and what silence means

The Act sets a fixed period for a reply, counted from the day the office receives your application, and it is deliberately short: days rather than weeks. Where the information concerns a person's life or personal liberty, the window is much tighter than that, tight enough that the office is expected to respond almost immediately. If a body cannot finish in time, it is meant to tell you in writing, with reasons, rather than let the file sit.

Exact figures have been quoted in Nepali RTI writing for years, and they are also the first thing to check in the current consolidated text, because amendments have moved numbers in this Act before. What you control is the other end of the process: the date stamped on your receipt. A reply that never arrives is still a decision you can appeal, and so is a partial answer that quietly drops one of the documents you listed.

A refusal has to name a ground

The law lists the grounds on which a public body may withhold information, and a refusal is expected to name the one it is relying on. A letter that just says your request is rejected is not a reasoned refusal. Keep it, note the date, and read the ground against the text. If it does not fit, say so in your appeal in one paragraph, without heat.

Appealing: first the body, then the Commission

If you are refused, ignored, or handed an incomplete answer, the Act gives you two stages. The first stays inside the system. The second goes to the National Information Commission.

Stage one. File the first appeal with the authority the Act names for that public body, not with the officer who refused you. Put it in writing, attach copies of your original request, your receipt or date stamp, and the refusal or incomplete reply if there is one, and set out in a few numbered lines what you asked for and why the answer was not good enough. The Act fixes a deadline for filing this appeal, and missing it can end your case before anyone reads the merits, so do not sit on a refusal for weeks hoping the office changes its mind. The appellate authority is expected to decide within the period the Act sets. If that period passes with no decision, treat the silence as a decision and move on.

Stage two. The second appeal or complaint goes to the National Information Commission. By this point your file should tell the whole story on its own: request, receipt, reply or silence, first appeal, and the outcome of that appeal or the silence that followed it. Ask the Commission's office whether a complaint can be filed online or has to come in person, and check its current guidance for what it wants attached and in how many copies. The Commission is the body that can direct a public body to release what it withheld, and where an officer has obstructed the process rather than simply refused, it can go beyond ordering disclosure.

If what you eventually receive points at corruption rather than sloppy record keeping, that is a separate track: a complaint to the anti-corruption body, which has its own process and its own view of who may file.

Before you file

A few things are worth doing first. Open the consolidated text of the Act and the Rules, not a summary, and read the provisions on the reply period, the fee and the appeal window yourself. Ask the public information officer in writing for the current fee and copying rate, so you have an answer with a date on it. And keep everything: the draft, the receipt, the replies, the dates you chased. The strength of an RTI case is almost never in the argument. It is in the paper.