The statutes and rules governing ‘electronic records’ in India have struggled to keep pace with the latest technology they are meant to regulate, while artificial intelligence has also widened this critical gap. The new Indian Evidence Act, the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (BSA) (2023), expands the definition of electronic records to capture AI-generated data, but the foundational question of what makes digital evidence trustworthy remains unresolved. Currently, courts are receiving evidence that has been processed, enhanced or partially generated by AI tools without a framework for assessing the integrity, provenance or reliability of the model that produced it. Section 63 certificates, designed for a world of static files and server logs, are now required to authenticate deepfakes, synthetic audio, AI-generated documents and algorithmically reconstructed timelines. 

This session will examine evidentiary fault lines that practitioners are already encountering: how to establish and challenge the authenticity of AI-generated or AI-processed evidence, what metadata analysis and forensic examination can and cannot offer, how the new IT Rules’ synthetic-content labelling requirements interact with section 63 and what judges and opposing counsel should actually be asking when a document, recording or dataset has passed through an AI system before reaching the courtroom. A practical session for litigators who can no longer assume that the evidence in front of them is what it appears to be.