De-indexing versus deletion — evaluate this distinction as a judicial remedy for balancing privacy and open justice in the digital age.

The right to be forgotten flows from informational privacy under Article 21, recognised in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) [1]. Courts have answered the privacy–transparency conflict not by erasing judicial records but by de-indexing them — a calibrated middle path that largely succeeds, though it leaves gaps.

The distinction explained

• Deletion/erasure removes the underlying record — the model of Article 17, EU GDPR.
• De-indexing merely breaks the link between a person's name and the record; the judgment survives, retrievable by case number, citation, court and date. The Delhi High Court's 144-page ruling of 29 May 2026 (Justice Sachin Datta) directed Google and Indian Kanoon to de-index name-based results in acquittals, quashings, matrimonial disputes and sexual-offence cases [2].

Merits as a remedy

• Preserves open justice: the judicial record stays intact and citable, so precedent, scrutiny and legal research are unaffected — deletion would have destroyed all three.
• Proportionality-compliant: it is the least restrictive means, satisfying the Puttaswamy legality–necessity–proportionality test [1].
• Targets the real harm: perpetual name-searchability, not the judgment itself; the Srikrishna Committee (2018) framed this as instilling the limitations of memory into a limitless digital sphere [3].
• Protects competing rights: keeps free speech and the right to receive information alive, which the Committee flagged as the key counterweight [3].

Limitations

• No statutory anchor — the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 confers neither a right to be forgotten nor data portability, and excludes court-proceeding information [4].
• Private adjudication: intermediaries decide requests without notified rules or a regulator.
• Leaky in practice: archived reportage, mirror sites and AI-driven aggregation can restore name-linkage.

De-indexing is therefore the correct remedial choice — it dilutes discoverability without diluting the record, honouring both privacy and transparency. Its durability now depends on legislative follow-through: statutory recognition of erasure rights under the DPDP framework, with a notified authority and appellate scrutiny, would convert a sound judicial innovation into a stable rights guarantee.