The Supreme Court on Friday issued a notice to the Centre on a plea challenging the “dilution” of the RTI Act by the amendments made through the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act.
While seeking the Centre’s response to the joint petition filed by RTI activists Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri, a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi tagged the matter with a similar pending petition and posted the matter to March 23.
According to Bhardwaj and Johri, the amendments to the RTI Act are beyond the legislative scope of the DPDP Act and should be struck down.
The petitioners submitted that the DPDP Act was limited to governing the processing of personal data held only in digital form and therefore any amendments to the RTI Act flowing from the DPDP Act should have been restricted to that scope.
“However, the amendments to the RTI Act will impact people’s right to access information held in even non-digital forms, for instance personal information held in handwritten records, physical archives, display boards, manual muster rolls/attendance records, physical answer scripts, minutes of meetings recorded in physical registers, physical records maintained by public authorities prior to adoption of digital means etc,” the petition, filed through advocate Prashant Bhushan, stated.
The petition also sought to highlight how the DPDP Act would have a “chilling impact” on people’s ability to use information to seek accountability, carry out public monitoring and social audits of welfare programmes and blow the whistle on corruption.
The petition flagged the deletion of a provision under Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act, which stated that information that cannot be denied to Parliament or a state legislature shall not be denied to any person. The plea said the deletion was “legally untenable as the legislative intent was for the proviso to be applicable to the entirety of Section 8(1) as evidenced through its language, placements and government’s own guidelines”.