Data bill suggests key changes to RTI law

The draft of the Digital Data Protection Bill proposes to do away with 8.1 (j) section of the RTI Act, which allows information commissioner to determine if personal information about administration officials can be released in the greater public interest.

Updated on: Nov 21, 2022, 07:33:17 IST

By Chetan Chauhan

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The Central government has proposed amending the Right To Information (RTI) Act to protect individual privacy by denying any personal information through an amendment in the proposed data protection law, the draft of which was released on Friday.

The draft of the Digital Data Protection Bill proposes to do away with 8.1 (j) section of the RTI Act, which allows information commissioner to determine if personal information about administration officials can be released in the greater public interest.

This is for the first time the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has proposed changes in the RTI Act related to provisions regarding sharing of information. The government in 2019 had amended the RTI Act provisions regarding appointment and salaries of the information commissioners by giving itself powers to fix term and salaries of commissioners.

Under RTI Act, information about an individual with the government, including its employees, can be shared following an RTI application provided there is enough ground that this will serve larger public interest.

The information can be shared with the application through a speaking order giving reasons why sharing the information will serve the large public interest. But, almost a third of the total rejections of RTI applications are by invoking section 8.1 (j) and the provision is said to be one of the most misused parts of the law, according to experts.

The proposed Data Protection bill, whose draft was shared by the government with public in Friday, has proposed to drastically change section 8.1 (j).

“The words “the disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or interest, or which would cause unwarranted invasion of the privacy of the individual unless the Central Public Information Officer or the State Public Information Officer or the appellate authority, as the case may be, is satisfied that the larger public interest justifies the disclosure of such information” shall be omitted,” the draft said.

With this, the amended section 8.1 (j) exemption would read “information which relates to personal information”.

While the data law proposal states this is in order to bring in “consistency”, experts said this could give a cover to corrupt officials.

RTI activist Shailesh Gandhi called the proposal an attempt of the NDA government to weaken the information law. “The present government amended the provisions relating to the status and tenure of the Information Commissions but did not touch the exemptions,” Gandhi said, who described exemptions as “well crafted” to provide balanced information to people.

“If the section 8.1 (j) is deleted it would weaken the law and would aide those against whom there are allegations of corruption. If this amendment is made, all information that can be related to a person may be denied. Most information relates to a person and hence the law would become a Right to Deny for public information officers (PIO) who do not wish to give information,” he said.

The proposed data protection law also provides for deletion of section 43A of the Information Technology Act dealing with compensation to protect data as this area would be covered under the new proposed law.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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