Article 19, the Centre for Independent Journalism, and the C4 Center jointly argued at a recent meeting that the right to information is already guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a) of the constitution as part of freedom of speech and expression, making a separate constitutional amendment unnecessary. Civil society groups contend that judicial interpretation has long read RTI into existing free-speech guarantees, and legislative or executive resistance cannot override what the constitution already protects implicitly.

The argument that RTI is inherent in Article 19(1)(a) rests on a well-established line of constitutional interpretation. The Supreme Court of India first read the right to information into Article 19(1)(a) in State of U.P. v. Raj Narain (1975), holding that the right to know is a necessary incident of free speech — citizens cannot meaningfully exercise expression without access to information held by the state. This was reinforced in S.P. Gupta v. Union of India (1981), where the Court held that in a democracy the public has a legitimate interest in knowing how governmental power is exercised. The Right to Information Act, 2005 is therefore a statutory crystallisation of a pre-existing constitutional right, not the source of that right. The constitutional right under Article 19(1)(a) can be restricted only under Article 19(2) — on grounds of sovereignty, security, public order, decency, contempt, defamation, or incitement — and any restriction must satisfy the twin tests of being a 'law' and being 'reasonable.' This means government opacity that falls outside Article 19(2) grounds is constitutionally impermissible even without the RTI Act. The civil-society position is that framing RTI as requiring a fresh constitutional amendment fundamentally misreads this settled doctrine and gives governments a false pretext for delay or dilution.