Imagine filing a Right to Information application asking which contractor was paid for a shoddy road, or whether a public official's academic degree is genuine, and being told the answer is now off-limits because it counts as someone's "personal information" — full stop, no questions asked about whether the public interest in knowing outweighs that person's privacy. That is precisely the situation RTI users across India now face, and it is the question the Supreme Court has decided is important enough to be settled not by a routine bench but by a Constitution Bench of the Court.
What happened
The dispute centres on Section 44(3) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act), which amended clause (j) of Section 8(1) of the Right to Information Act, 2005. Before this amendment, RTI authorities could withhold "personal information" only if its disclosure had no relationship to any public activity or interest, or would cause an unwarranted invasion of privacy — and even then, information could still be disclosed if the public interest in disclosure outweighed the harm to privacy. Parliament could also always compel disclosure of such information to itself. The DPDP amendment strips out both of these safety valves: personal information is now exempt from disclosure as a class, with no inbuilt public-interest balancing test written into the clause itself. Petitioners have argued before the Supreme Court that this converts a narrow, judicially balanced privacy exemption into a blanket shield that public authorities can use to refuse almost any RTI query naming an individual — including public servants acting in their official capacity. The Court, recognising that the case turns on how two constitutional values — the citizen's right to know and the individual's right to privacy — are to be reconciled, has referred the matter to a Constitution Bench for authoritative adjudication.
The law behind it
Three constitutional threads run through this case. The first is Article 19, which guarantees freedom of speech and expression. Courts have long read into this freedom an implicit right to know and to receive information, on the reasoning that a citizen cannot meaningfully participate in a democracy, or hold elected and appointed officials accountable, without access to information about how public power is exercised. The RTI Act was enacted precisely to give statutory teeth to this constitutional expectation, converting an abstract entitlement into an enforceable right to demand records from public authorities.
The second thread is Article 21, the right to life and personal liberty, under which the right to privacy has been recognised as a fundamental right. Privacy protects a person's control over their own personal data, bodily autonomy, and private choices from unwarranted intrusion — including intrusion by disclosure of personal facts to the world at large through an RTI reply. The tension is obvious: the more expansively "personal information" is defined and protected, the less transparency citizens can extract about public officials whose conduct in office is, in principle, a legitimate matter of public concern.
The third thread is procedural and constitutional in a different sense. Under Article 145, the Supreme Court's own rules provide that any case involving a substantial question of law as to the interpretation of the Constitution must be heard by a bench of at least five judges. Because reconciling Articles 19 and 21 in the specific context of a legislative amendment is exactly this kind of substantial constitutional question, the Court has chosen the Constitution Bench route rather than deciding the point through a smaller bench. This is also why the earlier round of the case, and the petitions challenging Section 44(3), had to be argued as invoking the Court's writ jurisdiction under Article 32, which allows citizens to approach the Supreme Court directly for enforcement of fundamental rights — here, the composite right to information flowing from Article 19 read with Article 21.
It is worth being precise about what changed textually. The unamended Section 8(1)(j) of the RTi Act had three moving parts: (a) a bar on disclosure of personal information with no relationship to public activity or interest, (b) a bar on information that would cause unwarranted invasion of privacy, and (c) a proviso stating that information which could not be denied to Parliament or a State Legislature could not be denied to any citizen, and that the officer could disclose information if satisfied that the larger public interest justified it. The DPDP amendment removes this internal balancing mechanism, replacing it with a flat exemption for "personal information." The petitioners' core argument is that this is not merely a tweak to an exemption but an evisceration of the right to information's core logic — because almost every record touching accountability (contracts, appointments, disciplinary action, asset disclosures) involves the "personal information" of some named individual.
How we got here
The RTI Act, 2005, was designed on the principle that disclosure is the rule and secrecy the exception, with Section 8 listing narrow, justiciable exemptions rather than administrative discretion. For nearly two decades, information officers, the Central and State Information Commissions, and courts developed a body of practice around balancing privacy against public interest under the unamended Section 8(1)(j) — asking, case by case, whether disclosure served an accountability purpose that outweighed the privacy cost. The DPDP Act, enacted primarily to create a comprehensive data-protection framework for digital personal data — covering consent, processing, and the powers of a Data Protection Board — used one of its consequential provisions to also rewrite this RTI exemption. Critics say this was done with limited standalone legislative debate on the RTI-specific consequences, since the amendment travelled as a schedule item within a much larger data-protection bill rather than as a freestanding amendment to the RTI Act itself. That legislative history is part of why the matter has now reached a Constitution Bench: the petitioners contend that Parliament, in pursuing a legitimate goal (protecting personal data), inadvertently or otherwise dismantled a separate constitutional guarantee (the right to know) without adequately weighing the trade-off.
What it means in practice
For an ordinary RTI applicant, the practical stakes are immediate. Until the Constitution Bench rules, public authorities can rely on the amended Section 8(1)(j) to reject requests that name individuals — a government employee's disciplinary record, a contractor's payment details, an official's qualifications — without engaging in any public-interest weighing exercise, because the statute no longer requires them to. Applicants who believe such information is genuinely in the public interest have a harder path: they must argue that the exemption itself is constitutionally infirm, a much bigger ask than pointing to the old proviso. For law students and exam aspirants, this case is a clean illustration of several perennial themes: the horizontal tension between two fundamental rights emanating from different Articles of Part III; the limits of using one statute (DPDP Act) to silently amend another (RTI Act) without a standalone constitutional impact assessment; and the procedural rule that questions of constitutional interpretation of this magnitude must go to a Constitution Bench rather than be resolved by a two- or three-judge bench, however persuasively argued.
What to watch
The reference itself does not decide the constitutional question — it only ensures that a larger bench, rather than a smaller one, will authoritatively settle whether Section 44(3) survives scrutiny under Articles 19 and 21, and if not, what remedy follows (reading down the provision, restoring a public-interest proviso by interpretation, or striking it down and leaving Parliament to legislate afresh). Readers should watch for how the Constitution Bench frames the test for balancing privacy against transparency, whether it revives some version of the public-interest weighing exercise through judicial interpretation even if the statutory text stays silent, and whether the Union government offers a legislative fix regardless of the litigation's outcome. Until then, RTI applicants, information officers and Information Commissions are operating under the amended, narrower version of Section 8(1)(j), with no settled constitutional final word on its validity.