India, Aug. 2 -- In 2017, the Supreme Court's judgment in KS Puttaswamy v. Union of India established that privacy was not a privilege granted by the State, but rather an intrinsic dimension of human dignity. The enactment of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 was held as a deliverance to that constitutional promise. At its core lay consent; an idea that individuals should meaningfully decide how their personal data is collected, processed, and used.

Yet a closer reading of the Act reveals an uncomfortable question: if consent is truly the cornerstone of this framework, why does the law spend so much of its architecture dismantling it?

This is not merely a question of legislative drafting. It concerns the very nature of auto...