The RTI Act Amendment Explained: What Changed and Why It's Controversial

Among its consequential amendments, the DPDP Act modifies Section 8(1)(j) of the Right to Information Act, 2005. Prior to the amendment, that provision exempted personal information from disclosure only where disclosure would cause an unwarranted invasion of privacy and there was no larger public interest justifying release, a formulation that built in a case-by-case balancing test weighing privacy against public interest, and that expressly stated information which could not be denied to Parliament or a state legislature could not be denied to a citizen.

The amended provision removes that public-interest balancing language, moving toward a position where personal information is more categorically exempt from RTI disclosure, without the information officer needing to weigh a competing public interest in each case before deciding whether to withhold it.

Transparency and right-to-information advocates have argued that the original balancing test was a deliberate and important safeguard, used in practice to obtain disclosure of things like the assets and qualifications of public officials, details of government employees implicated in corruption, or beneficiary lists for welfare schemes, where an individual's claimed privacy interest was outweighed by the public's interest in accountability. Removing that balancing test, the concern goes, risks giving public authorities an easy, categorical basis to refuse such requests simply by labelling the information personal, even where it previously would have been disclosed under the public-interest exception.

This is not a hypothetical worry drawn from nowhere; RTI applications concerning public officials and public expenditure are a significant share of the RTI Act's historical use, and civil society groups that rely on the law have been vocal that this amendment could blunt one of its more effective tools.

The government's rationale, and the position of those who support the change, is that RTI applications have at times been used, or arguably misused, to extract routine personal information about private individuals or lower-level public servants that has no real connection to public accountability, such as personal contact details, family information, or unrelated service records, under the guise of a nominal public interest claim. Aligning Section 8(1)(j) more closely with the Puttaswamy judgment's recognition of privacy as a fundamental right, on this view, corrects an imbalance that had tilted too far toward disclosure by default.

Both positions have a reasonable basis in how the prior provision was actually used in practice, and the honest position is that the amendment's real-world effect will depend heavily on how information officers and, eventually, courts interpret the narrower provision, an outcome that cannot be predicted with confidence at this stage.

The amendment does not touch the rest of the RTI Act's exemption structure, nor does it affect information that was already disclosable outside Section 8(1)(j), such as information relating to public activities of public officials that does not qualify as personal information at all. It is a targeted change to one exemption clause, not a wholesale rewrite of the transparency framework.

For the DPDP Act's own text and its schedule of consequential amendments, see the /act page, which cross-references the relevant sections directly.