Privacy at the Cost of Transparency? Section 44(3) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and the Future of the Right to Information in India

Abstract

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act), was enacted to give effect to the fundamental right to informational privacy recognised in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017). Yet a single, easily overlooked provision of that statute, Section 44(3), reaches back to amend the Right to Information Act, 2005 (RTI Act), and in doing so recalibrates the relationship between two constitutionally grounded rights. This paper examines that recalibration. Before the amendment, Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act exempted personal information from disclosure only where the information bore no relationship to public activity or where disclosure would constitute an unwarranted invasion of privacy, and even then a public information officer could order disclosure where the larger public interest so required. Section 44(3) replaces that calibrated exemption with a minimalist formula that withholds all information relating to personal information, removing the public-interest override that for two decades allowed transparency to prevail in cases of genuine public concern. The paper argues that this amendment dismantles the proportionality balance that Puttaswamy itself prescribed for reconciling privacy with the public's right to know, a right the Supreme Court has located within Article 19(1)(a). Through doctrinal analysis of the statutory text, the governing precedents, and the government's defence under Section 3 of the DPDP Act, the paper concludes that Section 44(3) is constitutionally infirm in its present form. It recommends restoring the public-interest override and re-establishing a structured balancing mechanism, so that India's data-protection regime advances privacy without eclipsing the transparency on which democratic accountability depends.