The Congress on Tuesday accused the Narendra Modi government of “weakening the Right to Information (RTI) Act” through the newly enacted data protection law and asserted that his party will keep fighting against the “dictatorial” regime to secure the rights of people.
The party centred its argument on the balance between Right to Privacy and Right to Information, arguing that crucial data about public welfare schemes and financial defaulters could be obscured under the new law.
“On the one hand, India has been coming on top in misinformation and disinformation for the past few years, on the other hand, the Modi government is bent on weakening the Right To Information (RTI) Act implemented by the Congress-UPA by bringing the data protection law,” Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge claimed in a post on X.
He said whether it is information related to the public sector like ration card lists, beneficiary labourers of MGNREGA, names of people involved in public welfare schemes, voter lists in elections, or the names of ‘scamster billionaires’ who take loans from government banks and flee abroad, “it is important for the names of all these to be available in public domain for the people”.
“Right to Privacy was also taken care of in Congress’ RTI, but it does not mean that the list of beneficiaries or the names of the fraudsters should not be made public,” Kharge said.
He alleged that the Modi government is “weakening the RTI in the name of data protection”, due to which such names will no longer be made public.
“Congress party will not allow RTI to weaken, we have raised our voice for it earlier also and will continue to raise our voice from the road to the Parliament,” Kharge claimed.
The RTI Act, enacted in 2005 under the Congress-led UPA government, enables citizens to access information from public authorities. However, the introduction of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, has sparked concerns about potential restrictions on the availability of such data.
The government asserts that the new law is intended to safeguard personal privacy, which was recognised as a fundamental right in the Supreme Court’s landmark 2017 judgment in Justice KS Puttaswamy (retd.) vs Union of India.