The Bihar State Human Rights Commission (BSHRC) has asked the Bihar government to suspend 54 public information officers (PIOs) on grounds of "torturing" RTI applicants. The Commission, headed by Justice S.N. Jha, has warned the government that failure to initiate departmental proceedings against these officials would result in a case being filed in the Bihar High Court.

The Commission has also asked that false cases lodged against applicants by the PIOs be withdrawn, terming it a "complete violation of human rights". The Commission's report illustrates that Patna has the highest number of human rights violations nationally. 1,502 incidents of human rights violations have been reported till September this year.

In a survey conducted by the National RTI Awards Secretariat assessing the performance of information commissions, Bihar is placed tenth out of the 28 state information commissions. Altogether, 262 officials have been punished in Bihar in the last year for not supplying information to applicants.

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