India’s biggest news publishers told the Supreme Court on Tuesday that the government’s data privacy law would force newsrooms to seek consent from the people they write about, a requirement their lawyer likened to censorship before publication and said could shut newsrooms down.
The hearing opened the most prominent legal challenge so far to the law, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government passed as the Digital Personal Data Protection Act in 2023. A group of 21 news publishers is challenging it, including companies owned by billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, and argues the law would trample investigative work and let the government identify journalists’ sources, according to a filing the group made and which was reported Monday. The Supreme Court posted the case for next month.
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Madhavi Goradia Divan, the lawyer for the Digital News Publishers Association, told the judges that the law changes the whole concept of what counts as news. “Newsrooms will shut down, if we have to ask for permission,” she said. Divan also told the court that earlier versions of the law exempted journalists but that the final text did not.
That missing carve-out is the publishers’ core complaint. The law has no written exemption for journalism, unlike data protection regimes in the European Union, Singapore and Britain, and the publishers said that alarmed them even though the government gave assurances at an August meeting that the law would protect press freedom. In a filing earlier this month, the publishers asked the court to quash most of the contentious provisions, which take effect in May 2027. They say the provisions could also force outlets to erase published stories and give the government power to demand information from publishers that could expose reporters’ sources.
The publishers’ association counts as members Ambani’s Network18, Adani’s NDTV, the Indian Express and Times Internet, which belongs to the group that publishes India’s largest-selling English-language daily. Until now, only free speech activists and a group of smaller news outlets had brought challenges to the law. The suit by the large publishers is the most high-profile challenge to the law so far, and it adds companies tied to two of the country’s richest men to the list of challengers.
The earlier cases give a sense of where the legal argument is headed. The law also amends the Right to Information Act, removing a public-interest safeguard that had allowed disclosure of personal information in appropriate cases and replacing it with a broader exemption, according to the petitioners. In February, the Supreme Court issued notice on petitions from the Reporters’ Collective, a digital news platform, and others challenging both the 2023 law and the rules the government issued under it in November 2025, but it declined to suspend the law while the cases proceed. Hearings in a bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant have since examined how the law interacts with the Right to Information Act, which it amends.
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Petitioners in those hearings argued that the law would impede investigative reporting. One advocate told the court that journalists would have to obtain the consent of the person named in a report before publishing and then erase the information if that person asked. Another, Prashant Bhushan, argued that the court had already settled the balance between privacy and the right to information in a 2019 ruling. Justice Joymalya Bagchi observed that the Right to Information Act and the 2019 ruling do not create a separate exemption for journalists beyond the free speech protection in Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution, and said the court would have to examine whether the two laws work together.
Press freedom groups have taken up the cause. Reporters Without Borders said the law and its rules effectively overturned more than 20 years of legislation protecting the right to information, and it urged the government to amend the rules so they are compatible with press freedom.
The government has not responded publicly to the publishers’ filing in the material Africa Today News reviewed. More broadly, critics accuse India of declining press freedom since Modi took office in 2014, saying many mainstream outlets have not scrutinized his government enough, while the government denies the charge and says it respects press freedom.
The law’s contentious provisions are due to come into force in May 2027, and the Supreme Court will hear the publishers’ case next month.
