The 2026 Tech Law Collision: Supreme Court Defers the RTI-Privacy Clash While the Centre Ducks AI Regulation

The Illusion of Settled Law: DPDP Under Fire

If you thought the notification of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Rules in late 2025 meant India’s tech law landscape was finally stabilizing, 2026 is already proving you wrong. For practicing advocates and corporate counsel, the first half of this year has delivered a chaotic mix of constitutional challenges, judicial hesitation, and a surprisingly hands-off approach to Artificial Intelligence by the Centre.

The most consequential development for writ practitioners and transparency advocates came on February 16, 2026, when the Supreme Court referred petitions challenging the DPDP Act’s controversial amendment to the Right to Information (RTI) Act to a larger bench. Crucially, the Court declined to stay the operation of the DPDP Act in the interim. For lawyers advising both public authorities and citizens, this creates an immediate, highly problematic status quo.

The Section 8(1)(j) Problem: Privacy as a Shield for Opacity

At the heart of the Supreme Court challenge is Section 44(3) of the DPDP Act, which quietly gutted Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act, 2005. Previously, Section 8(1)(j) protected personal information from disclosure unless the Central Public Information Officer (CPIO) was satisfied that the larger public interest justified the disclosure. It also contained the crucial proviso: "information which cannot be denied to the Parliament or a State Legislature shall not be denied to any person."

The DPDP Act wiped out that balancing test. It replaced it with a near-blanket exemption, prohibiting the disclosure of personal information under the RTI Act, period. By refusing to stay this provision, the Supreme Court has effectively greenlit a season of bureaucratic opacity.

"Until the larger bench decides the constitutional validity of this amendment against the touchstone of Article 19(1)(a) and the Puttaswamy mandate, public authorities will routinely weaponize the DPDP Act to reject RTI applications en masse. Litigators must now prepare for a surge in writ petitions challenging these mechanical rejections, arguing that the absolute bar constitutes a disproportionate restriction on the fundamental right to information."

This isn't merely an academic debate over privacy versus transparency; it is a massive practical hurdle for litigators who rely on the RTI Act as a pre-litigation discovery tool to unearth administrative irregularities, tender details, and public service appointments.

The Government’s AI Cop-Out: Shoehorning Generative AI into Existing Law

While the privacy framework is tied up in the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has made a striking policy choice regarding Artificial Intelligence. According to May 2026 reports, the Centre has decided against drafting a bespoke AI regulation, preferring instead to govern AI through the existing DPDP Act and Intellectual Property (IP) laws.

From a practice perspective, this "wait and see" approach is a regulatory blind spot that borders on negligence. Relying on the Copyright Act, 1957 to regulate Generative AI is like using a sledgehammer to perform surgery. Our current IP regime fundamentally lacks the vocabulary to address algorithmic training on copyrighted datasets. Does scraping publicly available data for LLM training constitute "fair dealing" under Section 52? Who is the "author" under Section 2(d) when an AI generates an artwork—the prompter, the programmer, or no one?

For IP lawyers, the government's reluctance to legislate means the burden of creating AI jurisprudence will fall entirely on the courts through infringement suits. Corporate counsel advising tech startups must immediately audit their clients' data-scraping practices. Without a statutory safe harbor for text and data mining (TDM) in India, relying on the Centre's vague assurance that "existing IP laws are sufficient" is a one-way ticket to a commercial injunction.

Strict Consent and State Surveillance: The Digi Yatra Red Flag

Meanwhile, the enforcement clock is ticking. With the 18-month transition period for DPDP compliance expiring on May 13, 2027, companies are running out of time to overhaul their data architectures. As SCC Online aptly highlighted in April, "consent governance" is becoming the most scrutinized obligation. Consent must now be free, specific, informed, unconditional, and unambiguous. The days of pre-ticked boxes and bundled privacy policies wrapped in dense legalese are officially over.

But the most fascinating legal battleground will be how the State applies these strict consent standards to itself. On March 7, 2026, the Kerala High Court issued notices to the Centre and the Digi Yatra Foundation regarding privacy concerns over the airport facial recognition system. This is a vital test case. The government cannot demand that private fiduciaries adhere to hyper-strict consent architectures while simultaneously deploying state-backed biometric tools that operate in regulatory gray areas.

The Takeaway for Practitioners

What does this 2026 landscape mean for the Indian lawyer?

First, if you are advising data fiduciaries, you must stress test their consent withdrawal mechanisms today. If withdrawing consent is harder than granting it, your client is already in breach of the DPDP Act.

Second, IP litigators should prepare for a wave of copyright infringement suits against AI platforms, as the government has explicitly left the heavy lifting to the judiciary.

Finally, constitutional and writ lawyers must aggressively challenge the blanket RTI rejections currently being issued under the guise of data protection. The Supreme Court may have deferred the battle, but in the trenches of the High Courts, the fight over the soul of India's information and privacy regime has only just begun.