On Tuesday, 27 October 2026, the Supreme Court is poised to hear a case whose consequences will reach well beyond the parties in the courtroom. It concerns the freedom of speech and expression, certainly. More than that, it concerns how the press in India will do its daily work, and above all whether investigative journalism, the slow, unglamorous, document-by-document kind, survives in any recognisable form once the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 comes fully into force in May 2027.
The petitioner is the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), which represents twenty-one of the country’s largest news organisations. Its 698-page petition was filed on 6 October. The membership roll is what turned a legal challenge into front-page news. It includes the Indian Express, Times Internet (part of the Times of India group), and also Network18, controlled by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance, and NDTV, now owned by the Adani Group. These are not outlets usually found on the barricades against the Union government.
News Is What Someone Wants Hidden
A line in newsrooms is variously credited to Lord Northcliffe, to William Randolph Hearst and to George Orwell, and its real author is probably lost for good. It runs, roughly: news is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; everything else is advertising, or public relations. Whoever coined it understood something that law-makers sometimes forget. The stories that matter most are, almost by definition, stories that their subjects would prefer never saw daylight. A law that hands the subject a veto over the story is not a privacy law in its effect. It is a suppression law, however good its intentions.
That, in a sentence, is the publishers’ case. The petition warns that the Act would reduce investigative journalism to “a benign and neutered recorder of events.”
A Law Written for Shopkeepers, Applied to Reporters
The background matters for the lay reader. In 2017, in the Puttaswamy judgment, a nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court declared privacy a fundamental right. Parliament’s answer, after six years and several drafts, was the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, with Rules notified in November 2025. The logic of the law is simple and, for most purposes, sound. Anyone who collects or uses a person’s digital data must inform that person, obtain consent, and erase the data if consent is withdrawn. An e-commerce site that wants a customer’s phone number must ask for it. So far, so reasonable.
The trouble lies in what the final Act left out. The earlier drafts, beginning with the one prepared by the Justice B.N. Srikrishna Committee in 2018, carried an exemption for journalistic purposes. The 2023 Act quietly dropped it. A reporter tracing a contractor’s shell companies is therefore, in the eyes of the statute, in the same position as an online grocer. Both are “data fiduciaries”, and both must play by the same rules.
Three Doors Left Open
The DNPA’s objections fall under three heads, and each is worth setting out plainly.
The first is consent. If a journalist must notify the subject of an investigation and seek consent before processing information about him, the subject gets advance warning. The petition argues, correctly in my view, that such notice gives the subject time to destroy evidence, shred documents and lean on witnesses. No police officer is required to seek a suspect’s permission before collecting evidence. A reporter, who has none of the police officer’s coercive powers, is now asked to do exactly that.
The second is erasure. Under the Act, a person may withdraw consent and demand that his data be erased. Applied to a newspaper’s archive, this becomes a statutory mechanism to un-publish. A politician exposed in 2026 could, in 2028, demand that the report be scrubbed or so heavily redacted as to be meaningless. Erasure of this kind does not protect privacy. It edits the historical record.
The third, and to my mind the gravest, is sources. The Act empowers the Union government to call for information from any data fiduciary. The petition describes this power as “nakedly unguided”, and it is hard to disagree. No prior judicial authorisation is required, and no carve-out exists for a journalist’s notes, drafts or communications with an informant. Having spent thirty-seven years on the other side of the reporter’s notebook, I can say from experience that every officer, at some point, has wanted to know who leaked a file. The law should not make that wish easy to fulfil. A whistleblower who fears that his name can be summoned by a ministry letter will simply stop calling the newsroom, and no prosecution of a journalist will ever be needed to produce that silence. The chilling effect does the work.
The Supreme Court itself, in the Pegasus matter in 2021, described the protection of journalistic sources as one of the basic conditions of press freedom. The Act does not engage with that holding at all.
The Case for the Law, Fairly Stated
An honest argument must give the other side its due, and the government’s side is not empty.
Ordinary citizens do need protection from doxxing, from sting operations staged for ratings, and from the trial-by-television that Indian studios have practised for two decades. A man acquitted after ten years has a legitimate claim not to be greeted by the original accusation every time someone searches his name. There is also a genuine definitional problem. Who is a journalist in 2026? A blanket exemption for “journalistic purposes” could be claimed by any YouTube channel, any extortionist with a camera phone, any political IT cell. Parliament may have reasoned that a wide door, once opened, cannot be guarded.
These are fair points. They are, however, arguments for a carefully drafted exemption, not for none at all. The asymmetry is what gives the game away. The Act grants the State broad exemptions on grounds of sovereignty, security and public order, and gives the press nothing in return. In its letter to the government, the DNPA made exactly this point. A law that shields the powerful from scrutiny while exposing the scrutinisers has its balance the wrong way round.
What Washington Learnt from a Student Newspaper
The comparative picture is instructive. The European Union, Singapore and the United Kingdom all exempt journalism from their data protection regimes in one form or another. India stands apart from them.
The United States has no general federal privacy law of this kind. Its approach to the press is shaped by a single episode worth recounting. In 1971 police in California searched the offices of the Stanford Daily, a student newspaper, looking for photographs of a campus clash. The Supreme Court upheld the search in Zurcher v. Stanford Daily (1978). Congress was sufficiently alarmed to pass the Privacy Protection Act, 1980, which bars government agencies, with narrow exceptions, from searching for or seizing a journalist’s work product and documents. In plain terms, Washington recognised that a newsroom is not just another office, and wrote that recognition into law. India’s Act contains no equivalent.
American courts have also held, in cases such as Florida Star v. B.J.F. (1989), that truthful reporting on matters of public concern cannot ordinarily be punished even when it involves private information. The European-style “right to be forgotten” has no footing there. The American record is not spotless. The Supreme Court refused a constitutional reporter’s privilege in Branzburg v. Hayes (1972), and a federal shield law has repeatedly stalled in Congress. Even so, no American statute asks a reporter to obtain the consent of the person under investigation.
The Messenger and the Message
It would be naive to ignore the irony in the petitioners’ gallery. Some of the loudest voices now invoking “pre-censorship” have not always shown much appetite for investigating the powerful. Commercial self-interest is plainly part of the motive, since compliance costs and legal exposure for listed media companies are real. A cynic might say the corporations have discovered press freedom on the day it touched their balance sheets.
The cynic would be right about the messenger and wrong about the message. A sound argument does not become unsound because of who makes it. If even the friendliest newsrooms find the law unworkable, the government should pause.
What the Court Can Do
The Apex Court need not strike down the Act, and it probably will not. Justice Joymalya Bagchi observed during an earlier hearing in the same batch of cases that journalists enjoy no protection beyond what the Constitution’s free-speech guarantee already gives them, which is preciselt what it gives to a private citizen. That is precisely the point. The free-speech guarantee is enough, if it is read into the statute. The Supreme Court can read down the consent and erasure provisions so that they do not apply to bona fide journalistic work in the public interest. It can require prior judicial or independent authorisation before the State demands material from a newsroom. And it can nudge Parliament to restore, in carefully drafted form, the exemption that the 2018 draft once contained.
India does not have to choose between protecting the citizen’s privacy and the citizen’s right to know. It does have to stop asking the watchdog to seek the burglar’s consent before it barks.