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The Delhi High Court connected Wednesday (February 18, 2026) asked the Union authorities to reply to a petition challenging definite provisions of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, for allegedly enabling surveillance and excessive power of the Executive arsenic good arsenic undermining judicial independence.
A Bench of Chief Justice D.K. Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia issued a announcement to the Central authorities connected the petition filed by Mr. Chandresh Jain, and posted it for proceeding successful April.
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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 entree to data; blocking without a hearing; lack of meaningful consent; opaque exemptions; dilution of the Right to Information Act; and an Executive-controlled information extortion Board and appellate tribunal.
“The DPDP Act creates a closed loop of Executive power, wherever the archetypal adjudicator (Data Protection Board) and the appellate authorization (Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal) some stay nether Executive control, portion Section 39 expressly bars the jurisdiction of civilian courts. This operation is Constitutionally unsustainable and violates the quality rights request of an autarkic adjudicatory body,” the plea said.
The provisions “strike astatine the bosom of quality rights jurisprudence, Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, and the antiauthoritarian committedness of a escaped society,” the plea said.
“The DPDP Act and DPDP Rules unneurotic alteration wide authorities surveillance, semipermanent retention of idiosyncratic and behavioural data, excessive Executive power implicit the Data Protection Board, and opaque mechanisms for obtaining idiosyncratic information without consent oregon transparency,” the petition said.
“The impugned provisions collectively interruption the Constitutional guarantees of equality, privacy, informational autonomy, escaped expression, and procedural fairness. The provisions interruption the Constitutional principles of separation of powers and judicial independence,” it added.
The plea besides claimed that the Act failed to make a “right-protective” privateness framework, and that the provisions indispensable beryllium struck down, work down, oregon severed to beryllium successful conformity with the Constitution.
