The Right to Information (RTI) act is an invaluable tool for transparency in India. However, the process of filing requests, tracking responses, and analyzing government documents is highly manual and fragmented. As developers, we have a unique opportunity to build tools that simplify civic engagement and empower public interest investigations.

Streamlining RTI Workflows

Filing an RTI request requires drafting precise, legally-compliant queries. We developed a small open-source utility that templates RTI requests based on past successful filings, helping journalists and citizens formulate effective questions.

Once disclosures are received, they are often in scanned, non-searchable PDF formats. We built a digital investigation pipeline that parses these document batches using Tesseract OCR, extracts structured data, and stores them in a searchable local catalog.

// Batch processing scanned PDFs using OCR
const tesseract = require('node-tesseract-ocr');

const ocrConfig = {
  lang: 'eng+hin',
  oem: 1,
  psm: 3,
};

async function extractTextFromDocument(pdfPagePath) {
  try {
    const text = await tesseract.recognize(pdfPagePath, ocrConfig);
    console.log('Extraction complete.');
    return text;
  } catch (error) {
    console.error('OCR failed:', error);
  }
}

Open Source and Civic Responsibility

Open-source civic tech brings accountability to public systems. By making code and investigation pipelines publicly accessible, we ensure that anyone can audit government data and contribute to public interest reporting. Code is more than a way to build businesses — it is a tool for democratic participation.