Right to Be Forgotten: Does India Recognize It?

So here's a question that comes up more often than you'd think: can you make the internet forget about you? Not in a dramatic, erase-all-traces, spy-movie kind of way. More like — can you get that old news article about a case you were acquitted in to stop appearing when someone Googles your name? Can you ask a platform to delete data you shared years ago for a purpose that's long since expired? Can you get your ex's blog post about your breakup de-indexed from search results? In Europe, the answer has been "yes, probably" since 2014. In India, the answer is "it's complicated, but maybe, sort of, depending on who you ask and which court you file in."

RTBF — the right to be forgotten, as lawyers and privacy people usually shorten it — started its modern life in Spain. In 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in the Google Spain v. AEPD case that individuals could ask Google to de-index search results containing personal information that was "inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant." A Spanish man named Mario Costeja Gonzalez had been trying for years to get Google to stop showing a 1998 newspaper notice about a forced property sale related to his debts. The debts were long settled, but the notice kept appearing. The court sided with him, and the principle took hold. When the GDPR came into effect in 2018, Article 17 formalized the right to erasure, giving EU residents a clear legal mechanism to request deletion of personal data under specific circumstances. Since then, Google has processed over 1.5 million de-indexing requests in Europe.

India didn't have any equivalent mechanism for a very long time. The Information Technology Act of 2000 was built for a different era — it dealt with cybercrime, electronic contracts, and digital signatures, but said nothing about an individual's right to have personal data erased or de-indexed. The concept started filtering into Indian legal consciousness through academic papers and judicial references in the mid-2010s, but it didn't become a live issue until people started experiencing real harm from persistent digital information. A person acquitted of criminal charges whose name still appeared in online court records. A woman whose photos were used without consent in articles she had no power to remove. A professional whose decade-old social media posts were being surfaced by potential employers.

Indian courts began engaging with the idea before the legislature did, and a few cases stand out. The most cited is Jorawer Singh Mundy v. Union of India, decided by the Delhi High Court in 2021. Mundy, an American citizen of Indian origin, had been acquitted in a narcotics case, but the High Court judgment mentioning his name remained available through Google Search and Indian legal databases like Indian Kanoon and Manupatra. He argued that the continued availability of this judgment, despite his acquittal, violated his right to privacy and his right to be forgotten. Justice Pratibha Singh agreed, directing Google and the legal databases to remove or de-index the judgment. The reasoning drew directly on the Puttaswamy privacy framework — the 2017 Supreme Court judgment that established privacy as a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution — and applied it to the specific context of digital erasure.

A 2019 case, Zulfiqar Ahman Khan v. Quintillion Business Media, involved a different flavor of the same issue. Khan, accused of sexual harassment during the #MeToo movement, sought removal of articles naming him from various publications and search results. The Delhi High Court acknowledged the existence of a right to be forgotten in Indian law but stopped short of ordering wholesale removal. The tension here was clear: one person's right to be forgotten collides with another person's right to free speech and the public interest in preserving information about allegations of misconduct. The court tried to balance both, and the result was a narrow order that didn't fully satisfy either party. That tension — privacy versus expression — runs through every RTBF case, in India and everywhere else, and there's no clean resolution. It's by nature a case-by-case, fact-specific determination.

The European Origins of Right to Be Forgotten

Karnataka High Court has handled several RTBF-adjacent cases, mostly involving petitioners who were acquitted in criminal proceedings and wanted their names redacted from publicly available judgments. The court granted several such requests, reasoning that once a person has been found not guilty, the continued association of their name with criminal proceedings serves no legitimate public purpose and causes ongoing reputational harm. These rulings are significant because they establish a pattern of judicial willingness to apply RTBF principles, even without a specific statute mandating it.

How Indian Courts Have Approached RTBF

Then came the Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023, which is the closest India has to a legislative RTBF framework. Section 12 of the DPDPA gives data principals — that's you and me, in the law's terminology — the right to request erasure of personal data from a data fiduciary once the specified purpose for collection has been fulfilled, when consent is withdrawn, or when the data is no longer necessary. This sounds good on paper, and it is a real step forward. But the DPDPA's erasure right is narrower than what "right to be forgotten" usually means in the European context. De-indexing from search engines isn't specifically addressed. Data published by third parties, like a news article that names you, isn't clearly covered either. It's focused on the direct relationship between a data principal and a data fiduciary — you and the company that collected your data — which leaves out a huge category of situations where personal information exists on platforms or websites that didn't collect it from you directly.

Government exemptions in the DPDPA deserve their own paragraph because they're quite broad and they directly affect RTBF. Section 17 allows the central government to exempt any government agency from the provisions of the Act — including erasure obligations — on grounds including sovereignty and integrity of India, security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, maintenance of public order, and prevention of incitement to any cognizable offense. These exemptions are familiar in Indian law; similar carve-outs exist in the Aadhaar Act and the Right to Information Act. But in the RTBF context, they mean that if a government entity holds your personal data, your ability to request its deletion is subject to exemptions so broad they could potentially cover almost anything the government chooses to classify under those headings. The lack of judicial oversight for these exemptions — the government itself decides whether an exemption applies — is a concern that privacy advocates like the Internet Freedom Foundation have raised repeatedly.

Established under the DPDPA and with its full bench appointed in early 2026, the Data Protection Board of India is supposed to be the adjudicatory body that handles complaints, including erasure requests that data fiduciaries refuse to honor. The Board hadn't conducted its first public hearing as of late February 2026, so there's no precedent yet for how it will handle RTBF-adjacent complaints. Will it take an expansive view of the erasure right, reading Section 12 broadly to approximate a real RTBF? Or will it stick to a narrow interpretation limited to the specific data fiduciary-data principal relationship? That question matters enormously, and we won't have an answer until the Board starts issuing decisions.

DPDPA and the Right to Erasure

Comparing India's position globally is instructive. The EU, through the GDPR, has the most developed RTBF infrastructure. Google has a dedicated tool for European de-indexing requests, and the process, while not fast, is well-documented and enforceable. Brazil's LGPD includes a right to erasure that's structurally similar to the GDPR's. South Korea's PIPA gives individuals the right to request deletion and de-indexing, and Korean courts have been receptive to such requests. Japan's Act on Protection of Personal Information was amended to include erasure rights that are somewhat broader than India's DPDPA. The United States, interestingly, has no federal equivalent — the First Amendment makes a broad RTBF politically and constitutionally difficult, though California's CCPA includes some erasure rights in the consumer context.

India's position is somewhere in the middle. The legal foundation exists — between the Puttaswamy judgment, judicial RTBF rulings, and the DPDPA's Section 12 — but the operational infrastructure doesn't. There's no standardized request form, no clear timeline for processing requests, no public database of decisions that would allow ordinary people to understand what kinds of requests succeed or fail. If you want to exercise your right to erasure today, in March 2026, your options are: send a formal written request to the data fiduciary citing Section 12 of the DPDPA and hope they comply; use Google's content removal tool (which exists for everyone globally but isn't specifically tailored to Indian legal rights); or go to court, which is expensive, slow, and accessible mainly to people with resources. None of these is a realistic option for the average Indian who just wants an embarrassing photo or an outdated article to stop appearing in search results.

The emergence of AI-generated content creates an entirely new dimension to the RTBF problem. If an AI chatbot generates false information about a real person — say, fabricating a criminal record or a scandalous history — does the person have the right to demand that the AI model be retrained to exclude that misinformation? Current RTBF frameworks don't address AI-generated data at all. They were designed for the web, for search engines, for databases. The question of how erasure rights apply to large language models that have "learned" false information is genuinely uncharted territory, and India's DPDPA certainly doesn't address it.

How India Compares Globally

Free speech tension deserves honest engagement because it's not just a government talking point — it's a real philosophical problem. News organizations argue, not unreasonably, that removing published articles at the request of the people they're about creates a chilling effect on journalism and allows powerful people to sanitize their public records. That argument carries weight. A politician who wants unflattering coverage removed, a businessman who wants a fraud investigation article de-indexed, a public figure who wants old controversial statements erased — these are cases where the public interest in preserving information arguably outweighs the individual's privacy interest. But the same mechanism that protects journalism also leaves a domestic violence survivor unable to remove her name from public court filings, or an acquitted person unable to escape the stigma of charges that were ultimately dismissed. The framework needs to be nuanced enough to distinguish between these categories, and so far, India's approach has relied on individual judges making those distinctions case by case, without clear legislative guidance on how to weigh the competing interests.

There's also a practical dimension that doesn't get discussed enough. Even when content is de-indexed from Google, it often remains on the original website, on cached versions, on internet archive services, and on social media platforms where it may have been shared. De-indexing reduces discoverability, which is genuinely valuable — most people find information through search engines, so removing it from search results significantly reduces its reach. But it doesn't eliminate the information. Anyone who knows the direct URL or uses a different search engine can still find it. The internet's architecture resists deletion by design — it was built for redundancy and persistence, not for forgetting. That's a technical reality that no law can fully overcome, though reducing discoverability through de-indexing is a meaningful partial solution.

Balancing Privacy and Free Expression

A class dimension to the right to be forgotten rarely gets discussed. The people who've successfully exercised RTBF-like rights in India are, by and large, people with access to good lawyers and the resources to pursue litigation. Jorawer Singh Mundy's case involved an American citizen with the means to hire a Delhi High Court advocate. The professionals seeking to have old allegations removed from search results are typically well-connected individuals who understand the legal system. A daily wage worker in Bihar whose personal data was published without consent in a local newspaper's online edition has the same theoretical right but zero practical ability to exercise it. The right to be forgotten, without accessible enforcement mechanisms, risks becoming a privilege available primarily to the economically and socially powerful — a tool for reputation management by those who can afford lawyers rather than a genuine right available to all citizens. The Data Protection Board's accessibility, fee structure, and procedural simplicity will determine whether the right has democratic reach or remains elite.

Interaction between RTBF and India's Right to Information Act creates another unresolved tension. The RTI Act gives citizens the right to access government-held information, including information about other individuals when it serves the public interest. If someone files an RTI request for court records that a petitioner has successfully gotten de-indexed under RTBF principles, which right prevails? Indian courts haven't squarely addressed this conflict. The RTI Act has a privacy exemption under Section 8(1)(j), which permits refusal of information that would invade someone's privacy if the disclosure has no relationship to public activity or interest. But the boundaries of that exemption are fuzzy, and different Central Information Commissioners have interpreted it differently. As RTBF claims increase, this tension between transparency and erasure will need clearer resolution.

Practical Challenges and Access Issues

Social media companies add their own layer of complexity. If you post something on Facebook or X and later regret it, you can delete the post from the platform. But cached versions, screenshots, and archives may persist. If a third party quoted your post in a blog or article, the original deletion doesn't remove the quote. Google's cache might retain the content for weeks. The Wayback Machine at archive.org may have snapshotted the page. Requesting erasure from the platform you posted on is relatively straightforward; achieving actual disappearance from the internet is a different proposition entirely. The right to be forgotten, even in its strongest European form, doesn't guarantee that information truly vanishes — it makes it harder to find through the most common search pathways, which is meaningful but not absolute.

Where does all this leave us? Somewhere in transition, which is an honest if unsatisfying answer. India has the constitutional basis for a right to be forgotten, scattered judicial precedents supporting it, and a new statute that provides a partial legislative framework. What's missing is the operational infrastructure to make the right accessible to ordinary people, clearer legislative language addressing de-indexing and third-party content, an active and assertive Data Protection Board willing to test the boundaries of its authority, and a societal conversation about how to balance erasure rights against free expression that goes beyond legal abstractions and engages with real human stories. The next few years — as the DPDPA's enforcement machinery comes online and the first wave of complaints works its way through the Board and eventually the courts — will shape what the right to be forgotten actually means in India, in practice rather than just in theory. It could go either way, and maybe that uncertainty is itself worth sitting with for a while.