The Reporters’ Collective has filed a case before the Supreme Court to prevent the government from attacking our rights as citizens, journalists, watchdog organisations, researchers, whistleblowers and transparency activists to hold it and other powerful actors accountable.

We believe, the government has surreptitiously and wrongfully shrunk our rights as citizen to access information for public purpose and to hold it and other powerful people accountable to citizens through the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023.

For wrongful purposes and with ill-intent the government has pitted our right to privacy against our right to information to do so.

The Union government has used provisions in the DPDP Act to attack and dilute the Right to Information Act for every citizen. Effectively, the government has handed itself unbridled powers to prevent information that is central to holding it and other powerful interests to account for decisions and actions they take which impacts us as citizens.  

The DPDP Act will render any accountability and investigative journalism in India infructuous by imposing restrictions on information that journalists can access, process and publish for public purpose to bring out knowledge, information and facts about the reality of governance in the country that the powerful do not want us at citizens to know.

Investigative journalism essentially requires and depends on the accessing, searching, processing and sharing of information by public-purposed citizens, including researchers, whistle-blowers, transparency activists, technologists and others. By turning important information which can be used to hold the powerful accountable into a poisoned fruit in the hands of citizens, the government seeks to cripple the voice of investigative and accountability journalism in India.

We read the DPDP Act as an attack on accountability and investigative journalism. We read the act as an attack by stealth on the citizens’ Right to Information.  The DPDP Act in its current form diminishes our democracy.

We do not seek an exception as journalists or for journalistic expression alone. We seek an exception to the denial of information and a repeal of the amendment to the RTI Act for public purpose by any citizen, which includes for the use of journalistic expression.

The Supreme Court has today ordered that the Union government be served notice in the case filed by The Reporters’ Collective and its founding editor, Nitin Sethi.

The Reporters’ Collective is deeply grateful to Senior Advocate Dr Abhishek Manu Singhvi for his representation before the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India.

A team of lawyers will lead our case: Advocates Apar Gupta, Muhammad Ali Khan, Indumugi C, Naman Kumar, Omar Hoda, Eesha Bakshi and Uday Bhatia.

Our Advocate on Record is Abishek Jebaraj, assisted by Reyna Shruti

We are making a copy of our petition public. It is available here to read.

For The Reporters’ Collective
Mayank Aggarwal and Nitin Sethi