Relevance: GS Paper II (Polity & Governance)
Why has this issue cropped up?
In August 2017, the Supreme Court declared the right to privacy a fundamental right.
The concern raised by this ruling of the Court
- This judgement made many transparency advocates apprehensive, fearing that the right to privacy — meant to protect citizens from arbitrary state and corporate surveillance — might be deployed first and foremost to shield authorities from scrutiny by citizens.
- The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018, drafted by the Srikrishna Committee, confirms these concerns.
The Personal Data Protection Bill
- The Bill identifies “personal data” as any data that directly or indirectly identifies a person.
- It then calls for amending clause 8.1.j of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005 to authorise public information officers, or PIOs, to deny information containing ‘personal data’, if they feel that such disclosure is likely to cause harm to ‘the data principal’, and if such harm outweighs public interest.
- The RTI Act’s core aim is to bring accountability by making available public records that disclose the actions and decisions of specific, identifiable members of the political class and the bureaucracy. The Data Protection Bill extends the cloak of ‘personal data’ over all such information.
Major issues with this bill
- When nine judges of the Supreme Court are unable to frame the bounds of privacy, can we expect PIOs to assess which information is private, and then weigh the potential harm to individuals due to disclosure, guided all the while by public interest and the cause of accountability?
- The amended clause will chill the RTI Act, as PIOs will now have a strong legal ground to play safe, and toss out RTI requests deploying an amended clause 8.1.j.
- The widespread abuse by PIOs need to be corrected, to reaffirm the fundamental right to information. Instead, the government is embarking on a project to legalise such ‘abuse’, by diluting transparency in the guise of an amendment furthering privacy.
Conclusion
If the Bill is passed as is, and the RTI Act amended, it will deal a body blow to India’s hard-won right to information. The Ministry of Information Technology is accepting public feedback on the Data Privacy Bill until the end of September. Citizens should use this window to urge the government not to amend the RTI Act.
