Right to Information Query Modelling via Graded Response Model

Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005 empowers citizens of India to access information from any governmental organization. Using this Act citizens can ask questions (through RTI applications/queries) to government offices and obtain answers. In this work we attempt to model RTI queries. Objective of modeling is to understand the latent patterns such as transparency and effectiveness of RTI Act implementation in the RTI query-reply process which are suggestive of possible amendments in the Indian Constitution. We employ Graded Response Model (GRM, a variant of Item Response Theory) for obtaining the latent patterns. A synthetic dataset corresponding to central and state educational institutions is constructed which has close characteristics to the collected RTI query dataset. From the GRM we infer that certain institutes are highly transparent in replying to citizen’s questions across various categories. We also infer that RTI act’s implementation is not uniform across diverse categories within a transparent institution.