India has witnessed a continued battle on introduction of Privacy laws since 2 decades. Every time the Government makes an attempt whether in 2006 when the Personal Data Protection Bill 2006 was introduced in the Parliamemnt by the then Government of which Mr Kapil Sibal was a part to the period of 2017 to 2023 when Supreme Court through the Putaswamy Government pushed the need for a law, there has been opposition for the law on one ground or the other.
Now after a long delay, Government of the day has taken steps to announce the time line of implementation. The law was enacted on 11th August 2023 but the implementation is happenning only on 13th May 2027 nearly 4 years later.
From 2023 to till date activists had the freedom to assist the Government to make appropriate challenges provided they were willing to have some flexibility to understand that “Privacy Cannot be allowed to be a tool of Criminals to hide”. They however waited till the date of implementation was frozen and have now gone to the Supreme Court.
On the face of it, the petitions of Reporter’s Collective, Mr Venkatesh Nayak and NCPRI are focussed on the dilution of the RTI Act but the petitions are not limited to the controversy on Section 44(3). The prayer extends to scrapping of DPDPA and the rules.
The grounds apart from the RTI Act is “Unfettered powers to the Government on surveillance”, “DPB susceptible to Executive Control” , “Vagueness,overboard and arbitrary”, “Disproportionate to the needs”, “Enabling unreasonable digital searches” , “Lack of balance between protection of Privacy Rights and Right to Information” etc.
One of the petitions specifically asks for striking down of Sections 5, 6, 8, 10, 17, 18, 19, 36, and 44(3), alongside Rules 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 16, 17, and 23 of the 2025 Rules.
In the past we have seen that the Government of India has not adequately defended the rights of citizens in the Supreme Court against the powerful advocates such as Mr Kapil Sibal, Prashant Bhushan and Vrinda Grover. These are firebrand advocates who are considered capable of swaying the views of the Court through their commendable skills of articultion.
FDPPI is committed to ensuring that DPDPA is implemented without further delay. While we do support many changes in the rules to enable “Compliance without Pain” and “Penlty without Grudge”, the objective of “DPDPA implementation at the earliest” remains in the forefront.
We shall therefore give a series of informative articles here which explains each of the DPDPA Clauses on which some objection has been raised.
We may also have to take a look at Subash Chandra case or Ankit Garg case or Girish Ramachandra Deshpande case which have been cited along with the Puttaswamy case to defend the petitions.
We believe that the Rules are flexible and can be tweaked if necessary. Supreme Court also has the power to read down any of the provisions of the law. A Combination of “Reading down” and “Tweaking of the Rules” can together satisfy the petitioners without the need for scrapping the law.
We hope the information provided here would help the other professionals to understand and follow the case more effectively. (The next hearing is on March 23)
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Naavi
