Scope of the “right to be forgotten” (RTBF)

The Illusion of Digital Erasure: Questioning India’s Right to be Forgotten

On December 2025, the Delhi High Court directed the removal of news reports about a banker discharged in a money laundering case—marking yet another judicial endorsement of the Right to be Forgotten (RTBF). The ruling, now challenged in the Supreme Court, brings India’s unresolved tensions over RTBF to the fore: restorative dignity versus press freedom, privacy versus accountability. Far from settled, the debate exposes institutional fragilities in how India’s legal system navigates digital rights in an era of relentless information proliferation.

The irony here is striking. While European jurisprudence decisively enshrined RTBF within its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, India continues to treat it as a judicially implied right under Article 21—the Right to Privacy. This patchwork recognition leaves critical questions unanswered. How should public interest be weighed against individual dignity? What thresholds should be set for erasure requests? And, more fundamentally, who bears responsibility for execution—government agencies, platforms, or data fiduciaries?

The Institutional Framework: Scattered and Tentative

India’s legal structure for RTBF remains piecemeal. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP), 2023 provides limited procedural safeguards, focusing on citizen-centric principles like consent and transparency. However, its enforcement body, the Data Protection Board of India, lacks prescriptive clarity for handling RTBF claims. While the DPDP recognises the right to erasure, it stops short of specifying execution guidelines, leaving platforms to interpret compliance inconsistently.

Wider digital governance regimes also fail to address RTBF adequately. The Information Technology Rules, 2021 establish grievance mechanisms, yet these do not explicitly acknowledge RTBF beyond surface-level takedown requests. Even Section 43A of the IT Act, 2000, which penalises organisations for data breaches, does not extend to the comprehensive erasure of harmful online footprints. Thus, much of RTBF’s operationalisation falls back on ad hoc judicial orders, with little statutory or regulatory backbone to guide them.

The Reality on the Ground

Critically, even where courts uphold RTBF, enforcement remains riddled with challenges. Removing digital records is not as straightforward as issuing directions to a single news outlet or platform. Search engines, like Google, might de-index content, but this does not address the hundreds of mirrored digital archives, cross-linked websites, or cached versions strewn across the internet. Consider the Jorawar Singh Mundy case (2021), where the Delhi High Court ordered erasure of records related to an acquitted individual. Despite the judgment, the petitioner’s name still appears in several unofficial repositories, undermining the very relief sought.

Moreover, RTBF claims in India face an uphill battle when pitted against institutional limits on judicial and bureaucratic capacity. As recognition of RTBF grows, so does the potential surge in petitions, each requiring case-by-case balancing of privacy against public interest. Courts, already burdened with criminal dockets and constitutional litigation, may find themselves overwhelmed, especially in the absence of specialised digital rights tribunals or clear statutory thresholds for analysis. This risks inconsistent adjudication, as seen in conflicting interpretations between jurisdictional benches.

The risk of misuse cannot be ignored either. Unlike the EU, where GDPR explicitly outlines circumstances for denial of RTBF (e.g., public interest or scientific research), India’s jurisprudence lacks such statutory guardrails. This opens the door to influential individuals weaponising RTBF to sanitise records of legitimate public scrutiny—whitewashing corruption cases, opaque financial dealings, or reputational controversies in ways antithetical to democratic transparency.

Lessons from the European Union

The European Union has managed to institutionalise RTBF with stricter guidelines and operational safeguards, though even its framework is far from perfect. Under Article 17 of GDPR, the right to erasure includes well-defined exceptions—protection of freedom of expression, legal obligations, or archival purposes in the public interest. Since 2014’s landmark Google Spain case, EU regulators have processed over 1.5 million takedown requests, with nearly 45% denied as falling within public utility or journalistic exemption categories. These numbers reflect an institutional trust in regulatory agencies such as the European Data Protection Board, which adjudicates disputes on proportional grounds rather than flooding courts with granular petitions.

India’s framework, by contrast, lacks such intermediary adjudicatory mechanisms or detailed regulatory guidelines, forcing the judiciary to become the default arbiter. The absence of data protection officers (DPOs) or statutory ombudsmen further weakens compliance pipelines, leaving most enforcement to individual discretion. Without such structural refinements, India’s RTBF framework risks becoming a blunt legal tool—imprecise, inconsistent, and prone to abuse.

A Future Already in Doubt

If India is to meaningfully adopt RTBF while safeguarding constitutional values, several institutional gaps must first be addressed. Success depends less on recognising RTBF in isolated rulings and more on crafting a detailed, enforceable legislative framework. A robust RTBF regime requires:

• Establishing independent digital privacy adjudicatory bodies with expertise in weighing privacy against public interest.
• Clear procedural safeguards for processing takedown requests, akin to GDPR’s Article 17.
• Building public awareness campaigns to frame RTBF as both a privacy right and a subject of ethical responsibility.
• Mandatory data mapping and erasure protocols for digital platforms to ensure de-indexing in meaningful terms, beyond symbolic compliance.

Finally, the interplay between RTBF and freedom of the press will remain its most enduring flashpoint. Courts must exercise extraordinary caution in categorising information as “irrelevant” or “unnecessary,” especially given the inherent public good served by accountable journalism. A healthy RTBF policy must acknowledge that digital dignity cannot come at the indiscriminate cost of democratic transparency.

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