A group of 21 news publishers, including companies owned by billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, has challenged India’s privacy law in court, arguing it would trample investigative work and let the government identify journalists’ sources, documents show.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government last year announced the implementation of a privacy law to protect the digital personal data of users, raising compliance requirements for platforms like Meta and Google.
The publishers have said that since media outlets were not exempt, the law was an invasion of press freedom.
It also marks an unusual challenge to the government from businesses headed by Mr. Ambani and Mr. Adani, who Opposition parties allege are close to Mr. Modi and get favourable treatment — charges the businesses and the government vehemently deny. DNPA and the media groups did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters , and neither did the IT Ministry. No response was cited.
The October 6 lawsuit, being reported for the first time and due to be heard on Tuesday (October 27, 2026), is the most high-profile challenge to the government’s privacy law. Until now, only free speech activists and a group of smaller news outlets had challenged it.
Media companies received assurances in an August meeting with the government that the law would protect press freedom, but not having a written carve-out for journalists like in the European Union, Singapore and Britain was alarming, the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) said in a confidential filing at the Supreme Court, reviewed by Reuters . The law would “render investigative journalism a benign and neutered recorder of events,” the 698-page filing said. The provisions “constitute pre-censorship which is anathema to any democracy worth its name”. In an August letter to the government attached to the lawsuit, the group said India “has chosen to grant broad exemptions to the state, while failing to extend any corresponding protection to the press”.
