ETV Bharat: Opinion: Tuesday, 24 February 2026.
What we are witnessing is not reform, but reversal. RTI is quietly being transformed into RDI—Right to Deny Information.
India's Right to
Information did not begin as legislative generosity. It began as a
constitutional promise. In a landmark judgment, Justice K. K. Mathew declared
that citizens have "a right to know every public act" of their
functionaries, tracing this right directly to Article 19(1)(a). Parliament gave
that promise statutory form through the Right to Information Act, 2005, which
shifted Indian democracy from passive voting to active participation.
The RTI Act treated the citizen as sovereign and disclosure as the norm. Information could be denied only through ten narrowly drawn exemptions under Section 8. This design enabled ordinary citizens to expose corruption, arbitrariness, and misuse of power—functions that no vigilance body or anti-corruption agency had ever performed effectively at scale.
Privacy was never ignored. Section 8(1)(j) protected personal information unrelated to public activity or interest, or whose disclosure would cause unwarranted invasion of privacy—unless a larger public interest justifies disclosure. Parliament went a step further.
Recognising that officials might struggle to define privacy, it inserted a decisive proviso: information that cannot be denied to Parliament or a State Legislature cannot be denied to any citizen. This single sentence anchored privacy within democratic accountability. That safeguard was dismantled not by a constitutional amendment, but by a Supreme Court judgement. In Girish Ramchandra Deshpande, the Supreme Court reduced an 87-word clause to its first six words—"information which relates to personal information"—and used this fragment to justify blanket denials. Almost any record can be linked to a person; corruption, by definition, always involves people. What followed was predictable: discretion widened, disclosure shrank, and the citizen lost ground.
Instead of correcting this distortion, the government chose to modify the law. The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act amputated Section 8(1)(j), deleting 81 words and retaining only the six that had already done the damage. It simultaneously defined "person" in a startlingly expansive manner—covering individuals, companies, associations, the State, and artificial legal entities. In effect, almost all information now "relates to a person" and is therefore exempt.
This is not merely a drafting choice; it is a structural inversion of RTI. To reinforce it, the DPDP Act imposes penalties of up to ₹250 crore and overrides RTI. A Public Information Officer now faces personal risk for disclosure, but none for denial. The rational bureaucratic response is silence.
The Economic Survey 2026 echoes this shift, expressing concern about privacy and governance under RTI and pointing out that many countries restrict the disclosure of personal information. What it omits is crucial: RTI’s express purpose is to curb corruption, and India has conspicuously failed to do so through institutional mechanisms alone. RTI succeeded precisely because it empowered citizens as decentralized auditors. There is no evidence that RTI harmed governance or worsened corruption. On the contrary, it forced accountability where institutions failed.
The turning point came with Puttaswami, which elevated privacy to a fundamental right. Yet the judgment itself records that the Constituent Assembly explicitly considered and rejected proposals to constitutionalise privacy, including secrecy of correspondence. Privacy was debated—and deliberately excluded. To resurrect it as a fundamental right despite this record requires creativity of the highest order. When paired with the diluted
RTI jurisprudence, this creativity has had one clear outcome: the steady erosion of the citizen’s right to know. Privacy is not a universal, context-free moral absolute. It is a social construct that must bend when public power is exercised. To grant public officials a privacy shield against scrutiny is to protect the powerful from the powerless. Transparency, not secrecy, is the currency of democracy.
What we are witnessing is not reform, but reversal. RTI is quietly being transformed into RDI—Right to Deny Information. Unlike overt censorship, this shift attracts little public resistance. Fundamental rights are rarely abolished in one stroke; they are hollowed out incrementally, through interpretation, amendment, and bureaucratic fear.
Since 1950, courts have expansively interpreted most fundamental rights. The Right to Information stands as the sole exception—systematically narrowed by both judiciary and executive, while citizens look away. A democracy that stops asking questions does not remain a democracy for long.
The country urgently needs a public debate on where privacy ends, and accountability begins. If it does not, the Right to Information will survive only in name—its spirit quietly extinguished.
The author Shailesh Gandhi is a former Chief Election Commissioner.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of ETV Bharat.
What we are witnessing is not reform, but reversal. RTI is quietly being transformed into RDI—Right to Deny Information.
 |
| Activists shout slogans during a protest against the amendments to the Right to Information (RTI) Act in the Lok Sabha of the Indian parliament, in New Delhi on July 25, 2019. (AFP) |
The RTI Act treated the citizen as sovereign and disclosure as the norm. Information could be denied only through ten narrowly drawn exemptions under Section 8. This design enabled ordinary citizens to expose corruption, arbitrariness, and misuse of power—functions that no vigilance body or anti-corruption agency had ever performed effectively at scale.
Privacy was never ignored. Section 8(1)(j) protected personal information unrelated to public activity or interest, or whose disclosure would cause unwarranted invasion of privacy—unless a larger public interest justifies disclosure. Parliament went a step further.
Recognising that officials might struggle to define privacy, it inserted a decisive proviso: information that cannot be denied to Parliament or a State Legislature cannot be denied to any citizen. This single sentence anchored privacy within democratic accountability. That safeguard was dismantled not by a constitutional amendment, but by a Supreme Court judgement. In Girish Ramchandra Deshpande, the Supreme Court reduced an 87-word clause to its first six words—"information which relates to personal information"—and used this fragment to justify blanket denials. Almost any record can be linked to a person; corruption, by definition, always involves people. What followed was predictable: discretion widened, disclosure shrank, and the citizen lost ground.
Instead of correcting this distortion, the government chose to modify the law. The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act amputated Section 8(1)(j), deleting 81 words and retaining only the six that had already done the damage. It simultaneously defined "person" in a startlingly expansive manner—covering individuals, companies, associations, the State, and artificial legal entities. In effect, almost all information now "relates to a person" and is therefore exempt.
This is not merely a drafting choice; it is a structural inversion of RTI. To reinforce it, the DPDP Act imposes penalties of up to ₹250 crore and overrides RTI. A Public Information Officer now faces personal risk for disclosure, but none for denial. The rational bureaucratic response is silence.
The Economic Survey 2026 echoes this shift, expressing concern about privacy and governance under RTI and pointing out that many countries restrict the disclosure of personal information. What it omits is crucial: RTI’s express purpose is to curb corruption, and India has conspicuously failed to do so through institutional mechanisms alone. RTI succeeded precisely because it empowered citizens as decentralized auditors. There is no evidence that RTI harmed governance or worsened corruption. On the contrary, it forced accountability where institutions failed.
The turning point came with Puttaswami, which elevated privacy to a fundamental right. Yet the judgment itself records that the Constituent Assembly explicitly considered and rejected proposals to constitutionalise privacy, including secrecy of correspondence. Privacy was debated—and deliberately excluded. To resurrect it as a fundamental right despite this record requires creativity of the highest order. When paired with the diluted
RTI jurisprudence, this creativity has had one clear outcome: the steady erosion of the citizen’s right to know. Privacy is not a universal, context-free moral absolute. It is a social construct that must bend when public power is exercised. To grant public officials a privacy shield against scrutiny is to protect the powerful from the powerless. Transparency, not secrecy, is the currency of democracy.
What we are witnessing is not reform, but reversal. RTI is quietly being transformed into RDI—Right to Deny Information. Unlike overt censorship, this shift attracts little public resistance. Fundamental rights are rarely abolished in one stroke; they are hollowed out incrementally, through interpretation, amendment, and bureaucratic fear.
Since 1950, courts have expansively interpreted most fundamental rights. The Right to Information stands as the sole exception—systematically narrowed by both judiciary and executive, while citizens look away. A democracy that stops asking questions does not remain a democracy for long.
The country urgently needs a public debate on where privacy ends, and accountability begins. If it does not, the Right to Information will survive only in name—its spirit quietly extinguished.
The author Shailesh Gandhi is a former Chief Election Commissioner.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of ETV Bharat.
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