SC to hear petitions against RTI amendment on Feb 16

THe sublime margaret court on mon testament try a batch of petitions challenging amendments to the Right to Information (RTI) Act introduced through the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, contending that they remove the discretion of information commissioners to decide whether disclosure of personal information serves a larger public interest.The first plea, filed by the National Campaign for Peoples’ Right to Information (NCPRI) through advocate Prashant Bhushan, challenges Section 44 of the DPDP Act as unconstitutional. It argues that the amendment effectively imposes a blanket bar on disclosure of personal information under Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act. The other petitions to be heard by the court include one by the Reporters Collective Trust and another by Venkatesh Nayak of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. These petitions have also challenged the same provision.Terming the change a serious blow to citizens’ fundamental right to information under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution, the petition states: “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 constitutional consequence is immediate and serious.”The petition by Nayak states, “The amendment to section 8(1)(j) 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.”The petitions are listed before a bench of Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant, justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul M Pancholi.The NCPRI contends that the unamended Section 8(1)(j) incorporated a balancing mechanism, empowering public information officers and appellate authorities to weigh the right to know against the right to privacy and permit disclosure where larger public interest justified it.The earlier provision exempted personal information only where disclosure had no relationship to public activity or would cause an unwarranted invasion of privacy, “unless” the authority was satisfied that larger public interest warranted disclosure.According to the petition, the amendment removes this balancing clause, reducing the provision to a simple exemption for “information which relates to personal information,” thereby eliminating statutory discretion.“The amendment imposes a blanket ban on the right to know under Article 19(1)(a) on the ground of privacy under Article 21, without maintaining a constitutionally mandated balance,” the plea states.It also argues that the unamended provision embodied a proportionality safeguard recognized by a Constitution bench in CPIO, Supreme Court of India vs Subhash Chandra Agarwal (2020).The DPDP Act received Presidential assent on August 11, 2023. Section 44 came into force on November 13, 2025, following a commencement notification issued by the Centre.