DPDP Act Will Worsen The Noida-stench Of Journalism
As India’s new data law looms, a scathing look at the media's complicity and the government's war on journalism.
Perhaps the greatest endorsement of the cabal of Noida journalists’ adeptness at bootlicking, is the stench that fills the air outside their centrally air-conditioned offices. Ms. A and Mr. S have spent at least a decade each in that small corner of Delhi’s satellite city—Noida Film City—building up their careers in television news. And while they’ve busied themselves with cosying up to the powers that be, boasting of an imagined closeness with the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Noida’s stench has gotten worse. If we were to apply the ‘city of dreams’ cliché to journalists, that ‘city’ would likely be Noida. It also, today, happens to be the city of gutters. And this dichotomy says a lot about the state of journalism in India today. Forget improving the lot of yours and mine, Noida’s anchors have even failed to drive an ever so slight improvement in their immediate surrounding. Barely 500 meters from the offices of these Noida-based news channels lies a wide-open gutter that’s shielded from public view but has shanties with families living beside the channel. On the driest of days, it seems of drownable depth. Several news anchors drive past it every day, not one bold enough to step out with their microphone. The same night, they sing paeans on Prime Time for bulldozer justice and crushing of dissent.
Their proclivity for blaring hatred targeted towards fellow Indians whilst being coddled in someone’s lap, has now become this dangerous precedent that’s being used to confine the other kind of journalism—good journalism—into oblivion. The rules for India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2025, are expected to be notified this month, after which the Act will come into effect. A dangerous provision in the Act is a backdoor amendment to India’s landmark Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005. The DPDP Act, if implemented, will amend Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act to exempt all personal information from disclosure. The RTI Act has been widely leveraged through the years by civil society activists and journalists to bring the corrupt within the government to account. The new amendment, though, threatens the law’s rightful application in public interest. Earlier, the RTI Act exempted disclosure of personal information only if it had no relationship to any public activity or public interest; or would cause unwarranted invasion of privacy. These exemptions were governed by the general rider that any “information that cannot be denied to Parliament or a State Legislature, cannot be denied to a person”. The DPDP Act will substantially widen the scope of these exemptions to include all personal information, so much so that even names of wilful defaulters, contractors, lists of people for monitoring public programs and government works, could potentially be denied under the garb of protecting individuals’ privacy.
What’s more? The DPDP Act, under the guise of acting tough against individuals and entities that fail to protect the personal data of their customers, also brings journalists and media organisations under its purview. So, a journalist writing about a person’s unlawful financial dealings in their investigative reports, could be treated on par with a data fiduciary such as Facebook that engages in unauthorised processing of a customer’s personal data or suffers a data breach, and fined an amount ranging from Rs 250-500 crores. The Act requires a data fiduciary to seek explicit consent of their customer before processing personal data and has no exemption for journalists or media organisations engaged in investigative work. Imagine receiving a tip that Nirav Modi is going to flee the country, and failing to publish the report in time because Modi isn’t giving you his consent to publish his travel plans. Poof!
One’s general perception while reading the fine print of any law promulgated by the present BJP-ruled government is two-fold. In case of the DPDP Act, at the outset, one is compelled to wonder if the absence of an exemption for journalistic work was an oversight, considering the widely known and established legal precedent whereby several data privacy legislations across the world impose hefty fines on data fiduciaries for data breaches and unauthorised processing of customers’ personal data, but also include explicitly spelt out exemptions for journalists and media organisations. Considering the abject lack of well-intentioned scholarly minds in the ruling BJP, it isn’t too difficult to imagine that the legal fine print may have escaped adequate scrutiny. But then, one remembers this government’s general attitude towards journalists who bite. The Prime Minister may claim to appreciate them—likening them to honeybees that turn nectar into honey but sting wrongdoers, in a recent podcast with Lex Fridman. However, his stooges are engaged in constant one-upmanship to penalise every scribe that dares speak an inconvenient truth. And herein lies the reason to be extremely worried.
A closer look at the DPDP Act’s seven-year long evolution through the corridors of Parliament reveals that the earlier drafts of the law in fact included an exemption for journalistic work, which was later removed. When questioned about the removal of exemption for journalistic activities in 2023 by digital media portal Newslaundry, the then Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar responded saying: “How can someone get a free pass just because they are a journalist? There is no free pass for anybody,” suggesting that the absence of an exemption for journalists was no legal slip up, but a deliberate move to silence the press.
A decade of television news’ subservience to the ‘regime’ has emboldened the latter enough to now attempt a burial of investigative journalism (what remains of it) without any last rites. The Rules may soon be notified, clearing the path for the DPDP Act’s implementation. You won’t find Ms A, Mr S and others of their ilk shedding any tears for the death of journalism. They’ve long given up the pretence of being true to their craft. We can only hope that true journalists will brave the threat of fines worth crores and continue to confront those in power, unlike honeybees, who die after their one sting.