The internet does not forget, and it does not let humans forget. This observation, made by the Supreme Court in Kancherla Durga Prasad, captures the central tension at the heart of the Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF) debate in India. In a digital ecosystem where personal data persists indefinitely, the question of whether an individual can compel the deletion or de-indexing of information about themselves has moved from academic abstraction to urgent legal reality.
The constitutional foundation for RTBF in India was laid by the landmark nine-judge bench decision in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India (2017), which unanimously held that the right to privacy is a fundamental right protected under Articles 14, 19, and 21 of the Constitution. The judgment recognised informational privacy as one of the three core aspects of privacy, alongside decisional autonomy and bodily integrity. Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, in his concurring opinion, specifically acknowledged the "right to be forgotten" as an emerging dimension of informational autonomy, the individual's power to control what is known about them and by whom.
Yet recognition is not enforcement. Puttaswamy did not create an enforceable statutory right to erasure. India, unlike the European Union where the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) under Article 17 codifies the right to erasure with defined exceptions and procedural safeguards, has no equivalent domestic legislation that squarely addresses RTBF. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDPA) provides a right to erasure under Section 12(3), but only within the narrow context of data collected for a specific purpose that has since been fulfilled. It does not address historical data, court records made digitally accessible, or third-party indexing through search engines.
Indian courts have attempted to fill this vacuum through ad hoc judicial intervention. The Karnataka High Court and the Delhi High Court have both issued orders directing the removal of names from court records available on online databases, relying on Articles 21 and 17 (right against exploitation) read with the right to dignity. However, these orders have been inconsistent. Courts have sometimes granted relief where public interest in the information was low, such as acquittals in matrimonial disputes, and denied it where the accused held public office or the matter remained in the public record. The result is a patchwork of outcomes driven by judicial discretion rather than principled legal standards.
The core difficulty lies in the absence of a balancing framework. RTBF is not an absolute right. It must be weighed against the public's legitimate interest in accessing accurate information, the media's freedom under Article 19(1)(a), the historical record, and the rights of victims or third parties. The EU's framework asks a series of structured questions: is the data accurate, is continued indexing necessary, and does the individual's privacy interest outweigh the public interest in access? Indian law provides no comparable structure, leaving courts and data fiduciaries to improvise.
The DPDPA's provisions, while a step forward, stop short of addressing the full scope of RTBF. The Act focuses primarily on data collected by Data Fiduciaries in the course of business and does not regulate search engine indexing, third-party publication, or legacy databases including court portals. There is a serious question whether the Data Protection Board established under the Act will have jurisdiction over historical data, publicly available information, or records that were lawfully published before the Act's commencement.
What India needs is not merely a broader reading of existing provisions but a standalone regulatory framework for RTBF, one that distinguishes between erasure (requiring the data fiduciary to delete), de-indexing (requiring search engines to suppress links without deleting the original content), and rectification (requiring correction of inaccurate data). Each has different implications for the holder, the public, and the data subject. A nuanced framework must also carve out explicit exceptions for journalism, academic research, historical archives, and ongoing criminal proceedings, as the Law Commission of India and several academic commentators have recommended.
Until such a framework is enacted, the RTBF in India remains a constitutional aspiration without legal infrastructure. Judges will continue to decide these cases on instinct rather than principle. The gap between what Puttaswamy promised, a structured right to control one's informational identity, and what the legal system currently delivers is not merely an academic concern. It determines whether a person acquitted of a crime can move forward without a permanent digital scar, whether a survivor can reclaim their dignity after details of assault are indexed in perpetuity, and whether the constitutional right to privacy has any operational meaning in an age of algorithmic memory.