Table of Contents
About the Instructor — CPD Course
Part of the PIO / FAA CPD Course.
Kushal Pathak — Instructor
Twenty-five years of RTI practice. Editor of RTI Wiki — India's most-cited plain-language reference on the RTI Act, 2005.
Practice
- Trained Public Information Officers and First Appellate Authorities in central ministries, state departments, police, municipal corporations, and PSUs across India.
- Drafted over 2,000 reasoned PIO orders and reviewed hundreds of First Appeals for departmental review teams.
- Advised vigilance offices on the §8(1)(h) boundary between investigation protection and transparency.
- Authored practitioner notes on every major post-2011 Supreme-Court RTI ruling.
Teaching
- Editorial lead for the PIO / FAA knowledge base — 25+ articles covering every §8(1) clause and §19 procedure.
- Author of the “Ask for records, not answers” drafting framework used by a majority of civil-society RTI trainers.
- Co-ordinator of the upcoming quarterly editorial review with retired Information Commissioners and senior RTI advocates.
Editorial
- Editor, RTI Wiki — operational since 2005.
- Sole author of the post-DPDP-2025 framework pages on §8(1)(j) and §8(2).
- Maintainer of the 410-page reference corpus that grounds every article on this site.
Writing
Regular contributor on RTI to practitioner newsletters, legal journals, and training academies. Style: plain English, statute-first, case-law-anchored, tested against real-world PIO and FAA cases.
Contact
- Email:
admin@bighelpers.in - CPD-specific:
cpd@bighelpers.in(coming soon) - Editorial feedback: Corrections page
Editorial board (forming)
The CPD course is supported by an editorial board of retired Information Commissioners and senior RTI advocates. We're actively onboarding — see Editorial Review — reviewer onboarding. Board members co-review the course content quarterly.
Why this course, from this instructor
The gap is not in the Act. The Act is well-drafted — and the Supreme Court has done excellent work clarifying it for twenty years. The gap is in everyday PIO drafting. A three-minute order on a routine RTI is the norm. A three-minute order that is *also* reasoned, clause-specific, and writ-proof is possible — if the officer has the mental muscle memory and the templates ready to hand.
This course gives you both. Not theory; muscle memory and templates. After 25 years of reading PIO orders that say “§8(1)(d) applies — request rejected” (and watching the FAA overturn every one of them), that is what I believe is worth teaching.
Related
Last reviewed: 21 April 2026.

Discussion