The Question RTI Officers No Longer Have to Ask

This Was Never a Privacy-vs-Transparency Balance

• Now There's No Balance Left Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act, 2005 never gave public authorities an automatic right to withhold personal information. It gave them a test: withhold it, unless the public interest in disclosure outweighs the privacy harm. That test - the public-interest override - is what let the Supreme Court order disclosure of judges' asset declarations in the 2019 Subhash Chandra Agarwal case, because the Court found public accountability outweighed the privacy claim on those specific facts. The provision assumed privacy and transparency would sometimes conflict and built a mechanism to work out which one wins, case by case. Section 44(3) of the DPDP Act, 2023 doesn't rebalance that test. It removes it. Personal information is now exempt from RTI disclosure, full stop - with no override, no weighing, no place in the text where public interest gets a hearing at all. That is a structurally different kind of provision. A balancing test can be argued case by case; a blanket exemption cannot be argued with at all, because there's no criterion left to argue against. This is the distinction Justice Bagchi's bench seems to be circling when it calls the current provision an "en bloc embargo" rather than a modified balance - the RTI Act operated on "certain access with conditions," the DPDP Act operates on categorical refusal. The practical effect runs exactly where you'd expect a test's disappearance to run: toward the officials and institutions that test used to expose. Asset declarations, disciplinary records, corruption inquiries - these were disclosable under RTI precisely because they counted as "personal information" that a public-interest override could still pry open when accountability demanded it. Strip the override and the same category of information becomes reflexively unreachable, not because a court weighed the specific facts and found privacy should win, but because the statute no longer asks the question. For an aspirant, the sharper reading isn't "privacy versus transparency and privacy currently has more votes." It's that Parliament, through the DPDP Act, chose to resolve a genuinely difficult constitutional tension - Puttaswamy's right to privacy against Article 19(1)(a)'s right to information - by removing the mechanism through which that tension used to get resolved on a case-by-case basis. Whether the Supreme Court restores some version of the override or accepts that Parliament can validly close that door by statute, is the real constitutional question sitting underneath this case - and it will likely turn less on whose right matters more and more on whether a blanket exemption without any override is itself a form of legislative overreach against Article 19(1)(a)'s guarantee.