Plea in Supreme Court challenging amendment to RTI Act through data protection law

New Delhi: National Campaign for Peoples Right to Information has filed a plea in the Supreme Court seeking a declaration that the substituted clause (j) of Section 8(1) of the Right to Information Act, 2005—brought into force through Section 44(3) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 —is unconstitutional for being violative of Articles 14 and 19(1)(a) of the Constitution.

The plea filed by advocate Prashant Bhushan contended that the amendment, brought into effect on November 13, 2025, strikes at the very foundation of the fundamental right to information under Article 19(1)(a). It claimed the amendment destroys the statutory architecture of transparency, and converts what was once a carefully balanced privacy exemption into an absolute bar that disables the functioning of the RTI Act itself.

The petition raised a narrow but constitutionally significant question, whether Parliament can, by deleting the statutory public interest override contained in Section 8(1)(j) of the Right to Information Act, 2005, convert a carefully calibrated privacy exemption into an absolute bar to disclosure, thereby extinguishing the operational safeguard that sustained the constitutional validity of the RTI framework under Articles 14 and 19(1)(a).

"The unamended Section 8(1)(j) was not a mere statutory exception; it embodied a legislatively mandated proportionality mechanism. It exempted personal information only where disclosure bore no relationship to any public activity or interest or would cause unwarranted invasion of privacy, and even then required disclosure where the larger public interest justified it,'' the plea said.

It contended the amendment imposed a blanket ban on right to know under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution on the ground of privacy under Article 21 which falls foul of the need to balance right to know vs right to privacy.

With the amendment, the frontline adjudicatory authorities who actually determined RTI applications no longer possessed any statutory jurisdiction to apply public interest balancing in cases involving personal information, it pointed out.

"The constitutional consequence is immediate and serious. Every RTI application involving identifiable public officials, procurement records, audit reports, appointment files, utilisation of public funds, or exercise of statutory discretion can now be denied automatically on the ground that it “relates to personal information”,'' the plea said.

Contending that the balancing mechanism that ensured proportionality has been dismantled, the plea claimed the exemption operates as an irrebuttable bar at the first gate, which is not a minor statutory adjustment; it is a structural alteration of the decision-making architecture of the RTI Act.

Similar plea filed by activist Venkatesh Nayak through advocate Vrinda Grover is likely to come up for hearing before the top court on Monday, February 16.

His plea contended, the amendment allowed the executive to deny information to citizens by citing the personal nature of the information, even for public functionaries entrusted with public duties.

"It is a death knell for participatory democracy, and ruinous to ideas of open governance, which must guide the Indian polity in consonance with the Constitutionally recognized fundamental right of the citizen to know and be informed,'' it said.