What is real, and what is mocked
This prototype was built for a hackathon from a documented audit of rtionline.gov.in. The audit was read-only browsing of a public website. Nothing was ever submitted to the live portal and no account was created there.
Real
- The 40 Central ministries and departments listed here are real bodies. Their names are public record.
- The statutory rules: ₹10 fee, 30 days to reply, 30 days to appeal, no fee for a first appeal, no reason may be demanded. RTI Act 2005 and RTI Rules 2012.
- The registration-number shape AAAAA/R/E/YY/NNNNN, taken from the portal's own user manual.
- The routing and prior-art matching that runs when you type a question. It is deterministic keyword scoring, computed on the server, and it shows you which of your own words caused each match.
- The problems being fixed. Each is documented in our audit of the live portal with a screenshot.
Mocked
- The ₹10 payment. No money moves and no payment field exists anywhere in this prototype.
- Every already-published record. All twelve are invented. No real document is reproduced.
- Officer replies. Written by us, triggered by a demo button.
- Registration numbers. Correct shape, issued locally, meaningless outside this prototype.
- The clock. The demo controls move a display-only date so a 30-day deadline can be shown in a short video.
- Storage. Your draft lives in a temporary key-value store keyed to a cookie, and is not durable. There are no accounts and no login.
draft storage driver: cloudflare-kv
Not here at all
- No Aadhaar, PAN, OTP, card or bank data is collected, generated or displayed — not even fake-looking values.
- No connection of any kind to any government system, live or test.
- No State Emblem, no Government of India branding, no NIC or DoPT marks. This is not an official product and does not imply approval by anyone.
- No account creation, no notifications, no officer-side views, no appeal decision stage, and no AI model call. Those are the next increments, not this one.
Where the problem statement comes from
A read-only audit of rtionline.gov.in and three international freedom-of-information portals, carried out on 22 August 2026: 13 documented gaps, 75 observations, and a benchmark scorecard.