THE TRANSPARENCY- PRIVACY PARADOX IN INDIA: A STUDY OF THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RTI AND DATA PROTECTION LAW
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53555/qc80v285Keywords:
Right to Information, Data Protection Law, Transparency and Privacy, Digital Governance, Information ConstitutionalismAbstract
The increasing digitisation of governance has intensified the interaction between transparency and data protection, raising complex questions for constitutional democracies. In India, this tension is most visibly manifested in the interface between the Right to Information Act, 2005 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. While both statutes possess independent normative legitimacy, their coexistence has generated institutional and doctrinal uncertainty, particularly following the amendment to Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act.
This paper examines how statutory design can reshape the practical operation of constitutional rights without formally reordering their hierarchy. Drawing on doctrinal analysis, statutory interpretation, and comparative experience from the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Mexico, the study demonstrates that the DPDP Act reconfigures transparency obligations by displacing the RTI Act’s contextual balancing framework through indirect legislative mechanisms. The paper argues that this shift does not reflect an explicit prioritisation of privacy over transparency, but rather a transformation of institutional incentives that favours categorical exclusion over proportional evaluation.
Conceptually, the study advances the idea of information constitutionalism by showing how constitutional values are mediated through legislative architecture and administrative practice. It concludes that the sustainability of democratic accountability in a digital state depends less on abstract rights recognition than on institutionalised mechanisms capable of holding transparency and privacy in principled tension.
References
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