Delhi High Court seeks Centre’s stand on plea challenging provisions of data protection law

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday (February 18, 2026) asked the Union government to reply to a petition challenging certain provisions of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, for allegedly enabling surveillance and excessive control of the Executive as well as undermining judicial independence.

A Bench of Chief Justice D.K. Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia issued a notice to the Central government on the petition filed by Mr. Chandresh Jain, and posted it for hearing in April.

The petition claimed that Sections 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 29, 30, 36, 37, 39, 40, and 44 of the DPDP Act and its Rules enabled unchecked Executive access to data; blocking without a hearing; absence of meaningful consent; opaque exemptions; dilution of the Right to Information Act; and an Executive-controlled data protection Board and appellate tribunal.

“The DPDP Act creates a closed loop of Executive power, where the first adjudicator (Data Protection Board) and the appellate authority (Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal) both remain under Executive control, while Section 39 expressly bars the jurisdiction of civil courts. This structure is Constitutionally unsustainable and violates the human rights requirement of an independent adjudicatory body,” the plea said.

The provisions “strike at the heart of human rights jurisprudence, Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, and the democratic promise of a free society,” the plea said.

“The DPDP Act and DPDP Rules together enable broad state surveillance, long-term storage of personal and behavioural data, excessive Executive control over the Data Protection Board, and opaque mechanisms for obtaining personal data without consent or transparency,” the petition said.

“The impugned provisions collectively violate the Constitutional guarantees of equality, privacy, informational autonomy, free expression, and procedural fairness. The provisions violate the Constitutional principles of separation of powers and judicial independence,” it added.

The plea also claimed that the Act failed to create a “right-protective” privacy framework, and that the provisions must be struck down, read down, or severed to be in conformity with the Constitution.