Marital Consent Vs. Digital Consent: How The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 Reproduces Gender Subordination Through The Language Of ‘Informed Consent’ For Rural Women In India
- IJLLR Journal
- Apr 2
- 2 min read
Sanya Khatri, LLM, Maharshi Dayanand Saraswati University, Ajmer
ABSTRACT
The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (hereinafter ‘DPDP Act’) is India’s most thorough legislative effort so far to regulate how personal data is collected, processed, and used. At the heart of the DPDP Act is the idea of ‘informed consent’ under Section 6, which says that a data principal must give consent that is free, specific, informed, unconditional, and unambiguous before her data can be processed. This paper argues that while the consent framework looks neutral on its face, it simply cannot protect rural women in India, who make up a large portion of the country’s digitally excluded population. Using a comparative socio-legal approach, the paper contends that the DPDP Act’s consent model unconsciously copies the same patriarchal subordination found in India’s matrimonial consent doctrines, under Hindu personal law and Muslim personal law, where formal consent is legally recognised even though it operates within conditions of structural coercion, economic dependence, and informational asymmetry. By mapping the idea of ‘consent’ from cases like Vishakha v. State of Rajasthan (1997), Independent Thought v. Union of India (2017), and Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) onto the DPDP Act’s consent provisions, this paper identifies a serious constitutional gap: because the state has not created the conditions for meaningful consent, the DPDP Act’s protections are practically fictional for the most vulnerable data principals. The paper ends with recommendations for a differentiated consent framework built around substantive equality principles under Articles 14, 15, and 21 of the Constitution of India.
Keywords: Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, informed consent, rural women, patriarchal subordination, matrimonial consent, Article 21, substantive equality, digital divide
