A crucial new law will make it hard to use the landmark right to information legislation, activists say.
BBC News, Delhi
But privacy experts have raised serious concerns, pointing out that the law does not protect citizens from surveillance and that it gives excessive power to the federal government in terms of application. Madan Lokur, a former Supreme Court judge, says that the amendment "will emasculate the RTI to a large extent".- information was often denied on flimsy grounds and successive governments have made several attempts to dilute it - activists fear the latest change will make answers almost impossible to access.The RTI law covers a wide ambit of organisations, including all departments formed under the Constitution or any government law or notification.
A 2012 committee on privacy law headed by Justice AP Shah had recommended that disclosures under the RTI Act should not constitute an infringement of privacy.The new data protection law overrides this clause. It merely says that any information that "relates to personal information" can be denied - which could include any answer that identifies an individual.
But now there is a blanket ban on personal information, which Mr Gandhi says is problematic, as "you could relate any information to a person one way or the other". "For instance, under the National Food Security Act, to check if there is corruption and someone does not get their rations, then people try to access information about fair-price shops and their sales registers to find out who was sold ration," Ms Bhardwaj says. This helps check for pilferages in the ration given by the government's public distribution system.
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