The Supreme Court has sought the Centre’s response on a PIL filed by an NGO challenging Section 44(3) of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, which the petitioner feels seriously impinges upon the citizen’s right to seek information under the RTI Act against public servants through the introduction of a “personal information” clause.
There was no exemption under the “personal information” category in Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act, which is substituted by Section 44(3) of the DPDP Act, the petitoner argued.
“Issue a writ of certiorari or a declaration, striking down Section 44(3) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, insofar as it substitutes Section 8(1)(j) of the Right to Information Act, 2005, as unconstitutional and void, being violative of Articles 14, 19(1)(a) and 21 of the Constitution,” the plea said.
Among the key reliefs sought, the petitioners have urged the court to restore the original Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act.
A bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi issued the notice to the government on the PIL filed by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan
along with activists Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and Shankar Singh Rawat.
“The impugned amendment has substituted a constitutionally calibrated privacy-protecting exemption into an everything-‘personal exemption’. It has stripped away the public activity test, the harm test, and the public interest test — and replaced the entire provision with the bare phrase ‘information which relates to personal information’, providing blanket immunity to the same,” the petition said.