Supreme Court deliberates clash between India’s right to information and data privacy laws

The Indian Supreme Court is evaluating how to balance transparency and privacy as two key laws, the RTI Act and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, face conflicting interpretations, with implications for public access and government accountability.

The Supreme Court is set to test a difficult boundary between two central laws that pull in opposite directions: the Right to Information Act, which is designed to force openness in government, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, which strengthens privacy controls over personal data. The immediate question is whether the newer privacy law can be read so broadly that it turns personal-data protection into a near-blanket bar on disclosure under the transparency regime.

The RTI Act has long operated on the principle that information held by public authorities should be disclosed unless a specific exemption applies. One of those limits, Section 8(1)(j), already protects personal information where disclosure has no link to public activity or interest or would amount to an unwarranted invasion of privacy. The DPDP Act, India’s first full data protection law, amended that provision through Section 44(3), prompting criticism that the balance has shifted too far in favour of secrecy. The concern is that officials could simply describe records as personal data and refuse disclosure even where public accountability is at stake.

During the hearing, Justice Joymalya Bagchi noted that the RTI Act covers a much wider field than the DPDP Act, which is limited to digital personal data. That distinction matters because the court is effectively being asked whether the later law creates a broader embargo that may be inconsistent with the older transparency framework. The bench indicated that the two statutes may need to be harmonised rather than treated as if one has displaced the other entirely.

The dispute also goes to a deeper constitutional tension between the right to know and the right to privacy, both recognised by the Supreme Court as fundamental rights. The RTI regime was built to curb arbitrariness and corruption, and privacy exemptions were never meant to shield official conduct from scrutiny. At the same time, the DPDP Act was enacted to protect personal data, not to weaken public access to information. With its rules still not fully operational, the court’s eventual ruling could shape how the government drafts public-interest exceptions and how far journalists can go when using RTI requests for investigative reporting.