Supreme Court Allows Cooperative Bank Member to Obtain Contract and Meeting Records Through RTI

A member’s request reaches the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court has upheld a cooperative bank member’s access to two records: the bank’s construction agreement with a labour cooperative society and the minutes of its last general body meeting. In The Muppathadam Service Co-Operative Bank Ltd. v. The State Chief Information Commissioner, neutral citation 2026 INSC 1153, Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran dismissed the bank’s appeals. Justice Chandran wrote the judgment. The Registrar must call for the documents and provide them to the member within two weeks.

The member had applied under the Right to Information Act, 2005 to the Joint Registrar of Cooperative Societies. His first request went through several rounds of review. On a later request, the State Information Commissioner and the Kerala High Court upheld access. The bank argued that it was a private cooperative body, not an RTI “public authority”, and that the Registrar’s statutory inspection powers could be used only after a formal inquiry decision.

The statutory route through the Registrar

Section 2(f) of the RTI Act defines information to include records relating to a private body which a public authority can access under another law. The Supreme Court applied that route rather than reclassifying the bank itself as a public authority. Sections 65 and 66 of the Kerala Co-operative Societies Act, 1969 give the Registrar inquiry, supervision and inspection powers, including access to a society’s books. The Court held that the Registrar did not have to possess the records already or first commit to a particular inquiry before this access could support the member’s RTI request.

That distinction matters. An RTI applicant cannot demand every private organisation’s records merely by naming a government office. The public authority must have a legal right of access to the particular information. Here the Court identified that right in the cooperative statute and treated the Registrar’s ability to obtain the building contract and meeting minutes as sufficient under Section 2(f).

Why the exemptions failed

The bank invoked Section 8(1)(d), which protects certain commercial confidence, and Section 8(1)(j), concerning personal information. The Court found that the construction contract did not reveal a trade secret or intellectual property and that the bid had already ended. A member of the bank had a direct relationship to the society’s expenditure and decisions. The meeting minutes and contract could therefore not be withheld on the asserted grounds in this setting.

The Bench also drew a boundary around its reasoning. It indicated that an identical request by a person wholly unconnected with the society could raise a different privacy analysis. Membership was important to the result, especially when considering whether the information was personal to the society or unrelated to a public activity. The decision should not be read as a blanket rule that all cooperative records are open to every citizen.

The Court referred to earlier case law on the status of cooperative societies and on the meaning of information relating to private bodies. It left intact the distinction between a body directly subject to the RTI Act and private-body information reachable through powers held by a public authority.

Practical effect

The appeals were dismissed, and the Registrar was directed to obtain the two records immediately and supply them within two weeks. For members seeking accountability in a cooperative institution, the ruling shows why the specific supervisory powers of the Registrar matter. A request should identify the records and the legal provision allowing the Registrar to inspect them.

For public information officers, the decision requires a provision-by-provision assessment. They should not refuse solely because the cooperative society is not itself a public authority, nor should they assume that every private document is automatically disclosable. The particular law granting access, the applicant’s relationship to the body and any properly supported exemption must be examined together.