Activists and Opposition Members of Parliament on March 13 expressed concern that a proposed amendment to the Right to Information Act, 2005, could close off avenues to citizens to uncover corruption. Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act allows public authorities to refuse access to information if it intrudes on the privacy of an individual, but permits disclosure of information if there is an overriding public interest.
The draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022, which the Union Government indicated it intends to introduce in the ongoing Budget session of Parliament, removes provisions from Section 8(1)(j) that allow public interest disclosure.
After the amendment, the RTI Act would “now say that any information that is personal will not be disclosed,” said Anjali Bhardwaj, Co-Convenor of the National Campaign for Peoples’ Right to Information (NCPRI).
Ms. Bhardwaj and three Members of Parliament were speaking at a discussion organised by the NCPRI.
“Whether the information is shared or not [if the Bill passes] will be at the whims and fancy of the Central government,” Congress MP Karti P. Chidambaram said.
The discussion featured remarks from grassroots RTI activists, who warned of specific ways in which the amendment could stall requests for information in the public interest. Kusum, an RTI activist from Munirka, said that she was able to discover that ration shops were not distributing cooking oil as required in her neighbourhood, but stock and retail records indicated that they were distributed.
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“I went to everyone’s homes [listed in the records] and asked if they got cooking oil,” Ms. Kusum said, after obtaining the records through RTI requests. “And that’s when we started getting the oil.”
The speakers were worried that such cases, where names of beneficiaries are obtained through ration distribution records and can be verified by activists, may start getting denied on privacy grounds. Other examples cited for where the RTI could be useful were misappropriated pension funds.
CPI(M) MP John Brittas said that the draft law was a “conspiracy” to weaken the RTI Act. Mr. Brittas, who is on the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Information Technology, promised that he would seek the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for clarity on why six years after the K.S. Puttaswamy case in the Supreme Court, which affirmed the fundamental right to privacy, a data protection legislation was circulated for the committee only once.
“I don’t think privacy should be given a go-by because of demands for absolute transparency,” Mr. Chidambaram said at one point during the event, calling for a “fine balance” between the rights to information and privacy.
Activist and NCPRI founding member Nikhil Dey responded that the RTI movement had always sought to balance the two.
“Section 8(1)(j) was very carefully thought of to protect privacy because obviously the RTI cannot be [intruding] in the domain of a person’s privacy,” Mr. Dey said. “This [Bill] to us is a destruction of the fine balance that you are talking about.”
Published - March 13, 2023 08:37 pm IST
