Data Protection And The Right To Information: Section 44(3) In India

Abstract

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 amended the Right to Information Act 2005 through a single sub-section of its miscellaneous chapter. The amendment substituted the exemption for personal information in the transparency statute, removing the qualification that had made disclosure turn on the presence of a larger public interest. This article examines the amendment as a question of statutory design rather than as a contest between privacy and transparency. It argues that the balancing structure removed by the amendment was not an accident of drafting but the mechanism through which the transparency statute reconciled two constitutional interests, and that its removal transfers a judgment previously made case by case into a categorical rule applied at the level of the information class. The article traces the judicial construction of the earlier provision, which had already narrowed disclosure considerably, and shows that the amendment displaces the very authority that produced that narrowing. It examines the constitutional position after the privacy judgment, the special problem of information about public servants acting in an official capacity, and the position of statutes elsewhere that address the same conflict through an exception rather than a prohibition. It proposes the restoration of the public interest override, a defined class of official capacity information excluded from the exemption, and a duty to record reasons