Reporters Collective: New Delhi: Saturday, August 02, 2025.
To
Press Club of India, New Delhi.
Editors Guild of India, New Delhi
Digipub News India Foundation, New Delhi
Indian Women’s Press Corps, New Delhi
We write to you on behalf of The Reporters’ Collective. We are a registered trust of independent investigative journalists. We are constituent members of Digipub as an organisation and of the Press Club of India in our individual capacities. We are members of the Global Investigative Journalism Network.
We were recently made aware by some of you that the Union government of India interacted with representatives from the four entities on the DPDP Act, 2023.
We write to you, deeply concerned about the crushing impact of the Digital Personal Data Protection
Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) on:
1. The Right to Information Act, 2005
2. The right of citizens under the Constitution to access and make public information that holds
the powerful to account for legitimate public purposes.
And consequently on:
3. Journalism as a public-purpose tool to safeguard and further the democratic rights of all citizens of our country.
Several independent jurists and legal experts have warned of how the DPDP Act, which is yet to be notified, deals a body blow to the first two and by consequence, renders journalism incapable of being conducted in India in any other form other than as an advertisement promoting the powerful.
To spare the legal details, we append one such legal reading of the impacts of DPDP Act, authored by Justice A P Shah, detailing its ill consequences. You may have already read this as well as taken advice from your legal counsel.
We are all aware:
1. How critical the Right to Information Act, 2005 has been for every citizen, including journalists, to bring greater accountability of the government towards the citizens.
2. That public-purposed organisations and citizens, from villages to metropolitans, along with transparency activists, have used the RTI Act widely, at scale, with persistence and rigorously to empower all of us, including the journalists, to tell the truth. It is their persistent effort that has often brought out information that we as journalists have put our pens to help citizens know better.
3. Sometimes they have had to pay the price with their lives for doing so.
4. That journalism is being rendered toothless through the DPDP Act, by choking RTI Act and by strangulating the right of the whistleblowers, transparency activists, researchers, lawyers and larger civic society’s right to hold the government to account.
Therefore, it is incumbent upon us as journalists to defend the Right to Information Act, 2005 and the citizens’ right to access, process and disseminate information that holds the government and other powerful entities answerable to citizens. It is only by defending these rights of citizens that we as journalists can protect our right to conduct our profession in a manner that serves public purpose.
In light of the above we strongly urge you to,
1. Share a cogent written record of the discussions held by the four organisations with the Union government because these conversations are not of the nature of trade negotiations but for the public purpose of protecting the rights of citizens, and as a subset, that of journalists and journalism.
2. Reiterate to the government, to fraternal colleagues and to the citizens, that each of you continue to hold the opinion that
a. The DPDP Act must be amended to protect the existing provisions of RTI Act and
b. The right of all public-purposed entities, professions and citizens to access, process and use and disseminate information that enables holding the government and other powerful entities to account.
3. Reiterate, that the harm to profession of journalism by the DPDP Act can only be undone by amending the DPDP Act to safeguard the RTI Act as it stands today and the protection of the right of the citizens at large on above mentioned counts.
4. Affirm that we continue to agree with the array of eminent justices, experts and lawyers that no oral or written claims, assurances or clarifications from the government in any form carry any legal weight while the DPDP Act continues to stand in its current form.
5. Reiterate that you are not agreeable to a compromise that provides a fig-leaf to the government by merely carving an ineffective exception for journalists in the DPDP Act through any route, while leaving intact other provisions that kill the RTI Act and the people’s right to hold the government accountable by the use of information.
6. Take a more consultative approach by engaging meaningfully with your constituent members and the journalistic fraternity at large across the country, besides the public-spirited organisations, experts and individuals who have kept us all better informed of the impacts of the DPDP Act.
7. Engage with the government in a transparent manner. We urge you to do so because all four of you have previously taken the initiative to share concerns about the DPDP Act. We are thankful to you for it. And by the privilege of being located operationally in Delhi, you are now engaged with the government to shape public policy, citizens’ interests and the profession of journalism in India as impacted by the law going by your own accounts.
You hold the privilege to represent citizens’ and journalism’s interest. You also therefore carry the responsibility that comes with it to be uncompromising about citizens’ rights. And as part of it, not as an exception to it, be uncompromising about our rights as journalists.
We write to you in trust that you shall continue to take a principled stand and convince the government to do right. And if you cannot, continue to stand up for those principles through the legal recourse available to us. We will also share this letter with the larger fraternity of journalists and citizens to help us all engage with this serious threat to our profession more actively.
The Reporters’ Collective
Nitin Sethi and Mayank Aggarwal, Trustees
August 1st, 2025
Legal Commentary by Justice A P Shah can be read here.
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