RTI Act amendment won’t reduce transparency: Ashwini Vaishnaw

Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw.
| Photo Credit: SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA

The upcoming amendment to the Right to Information Act, 2005 will maintain “the need for transparency in public life,” and will “not restrict disclosure of personal information,” Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said in a letter to Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Thursday (April 10, 2025).

Mr. Ramesh had raised civil society concerns that the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023’s amendments to the RTI Act would allow the government to deny information on subsidy allocations and other schemes if the personal information of citizens and government officials are involved.

The amendment — which will kick in when the DPDP Rules are notified in the coming weeks to enforce the Act — will be a significant blow to the RTI Act, according to activists. Civil society groups, spanning the gamut from digital rights advocates to pro-transparency outfits, have raised an alarm over this amendment for years. Over 120 Opposition MPs have now signed a letter to Mr. Vaishnaw, seeking a repeal of the amendment.

Seeking a balance

In his letter defending the amendment, Mr. Vaishnaw cited the Supreme Court’s right to privacy judgement in 2017, which held the right to informational privacy as fundamental under Article 21 of the Constitution. There is a “need for harmonious provisions between the right to information and the right to privacy” laws, he said.

However, activists say that this balance has already been achieved in the RTI Act. Section 8(1)(j), the exemption for personal information that is in the existing version of the RTI law, “was very nuanced because it stopped any vicarious seeking of information,” said Anjali Bhardwaj, co-convenor of the National Campaign for the People’s Right to Information (NCPRI). She noted that “there was a lot of care that was taken to balance out the right to privacy and the right to information” even before the law was finalised in 2005.

Ms. Bhardwaj said on Thursday that Mr. Vaishnaw’s response “does not acknowledge the amendments”, which “will severely curtail people’s right to access information that they need to expose corruption and abuse of power and to hold governments accountable.” Another RTI amendment in the DPDP Act deletes a provision that states that “any information that cannot be denied to the Parliament and State legislature cannot be denied to citizens.” Mr. Vaishnaw’s response is silent on that front too, Ms. Bhardwaj said.

Mr. Vaishnaw said that information that is specifically required to be disclosed “under legal obligations” would continue to be disclosed, insisting that the amendments were carried out to “prevent potential misuse of the law”. He offered to meet Mr. Ramesh for any “further discussions” on the topic.