The Privacy Paradox: A Doctrinal Evaluation Of The DPDP Act’s Chilling Effect On The Right To Information Under Article 19(1)(A)
- IJLLR Journal
- May 15
- 2 min read
Divyanshu Bhardwaj, PhD Scholar at CSJMU, Kanpur
ABSTRACT
The conflict between the ideas of democratic transparency and informational privacy has become the most complicated constitutional paradox in the modern Indian jurisprudence. This paper is a comprehensive doctrinal analysis of the friction created by the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, and especially its highly consequential amendment of the Right to Information Act, 2005, Section 8(1)(j). The RTI Act initially carefully balanced the right to information, a judicially realized element of the freedom of speech and expression of Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India with the right to privacy of Article 21, through a subtle public interest override. But the DPDP Act, under the mechanism of Section 44(3) is a systematic breakdown of the constitutional soundness of proportionality in that, instead of the qualified exemption of personal information, Section 44(3) introduces a blanket ban on disclosure that is unqualified. The study examines the chilling effect that follows this legislative change through assessing the doctrinal basis of this change on investigative journalism, governmental questioning, and accountability in democracy. The paper discusses the theoretical aspects of the privacy paradox and uses the contextual integrity framework by Helen Nissenbaum to show how the blanket exemption is wrongly applying the concept of data that is in the open world. Moreover, the analysis will focus on the asymmetrical visibility that the Act has produced, in this case, understood as a legislative panopticon, in which state instrumentalities are protected against the scrutiny of citizens, but the power of state surveillance is dramatically increased. Based on a mixed approach of doctrinal deconstruction and comparative analysis using the information of the United Kingdom, the results indicate that the promotion of privacy to be an absolute statutory privilege at the cost of transparency is jurisprudentially unsound. The report ends with a proposal of a jurisprudential realignment that the constitutional courts should read a proportionality requirement back into the amended structure to maintain the balance of existence.
Keywords: Privacy Paradox, Right to Information, DPDP Act 2023, Chilling Effect Doctrine, Article 19(1)(a), Constitutional Law.
