Discuss the constitutional basis of the 'right to be forgotten' in India and examine the challenges in its enforcement in the absence of a codified statute.

Q. Discuss the constitutional basis of the 'right to be forgotten' in India and examine the challenges in its enforcement in the absence of a codified statute. (15 marks, 250-350 words)

The right to be forgotten (RTBF) — an individual's claim to have stale, legally-resolved personal information de-indexed from public digital records — has no statutory home in India. It survives entirely as a judicially-crafted facet of the right to privacy under Article 21, making its foundation strong in principle but fragile in enforcement.

Constitutional basis

• Article 21: the nine-judge Bench in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) held privacy intrinsic to life and personal liberty, and read informational privacy — including a qualified right to be forgotten — into it [1].
• Qualified, not absolute: subject to public interest, public health, research and legal-claim exceptions, reflecting the competing constitutional value of open justice [1].
• Dignity and reputation: courts treat an acquittal as a judicial declaration of innocence that permanent search-engine visibility should not defeat — the Karnataka High Court (2026) directed court registries, State police, Google and Indian Kanoon to mask the name of a woman acquitted under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956 [2].
• High Court lineage: Sri Vasunathan (Karnataka, 2017) and later Kerala High Court rulings on survivors' identities built the doctrine incrementally.

Enforcement challenges without a statute

• No defined trigger or threshold: relief rests on judicial discretion, producing divergent standards across benches and High Courts — unlike the EU's codified Article 17, GDPR.
• Statutory gap: the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 grants erasure only against a data fiduciary, and expressly exempts data retained under law or needed to comply with a court order — leaving judicial records outside its reach [3].
• Intermediary compliance: search engines and private databases act under the IT Rules, 2021 grievance machinery, with no dedicated de-indexing procedure or appeal route for RTBF [4].
• Administrative burden: compliance spans registries, police and global platforms, with no monitoring authority.
• Transparency cost: unchecked masking can erode public access to precedent.

A narrowly-drafted statutory framework — clear eligibility (acquittal, discharge, survivor identity), a time-bound de-indexing procedure and an appellate check — would convert scattered judicial relief into predictable rights, harmonising dignity under Article 21 with open justice.

(~330 words)

Sources: 1. Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, Supreme Court of India, 24 Aug 2017 — privacy under Article 21; qualified right to be forgotten and its exceptions 2. Karnataka HC recognises the 'right to be forgotten', The Hindu, 5 August 2026 — masking directions to registries, police, Google and Indian Kanoon in an ITPA acquittal 3. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (Act No. 22 of 2023), Section 12 — erasure right limited by legal retention and court-order exceptions 4. IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, MeitY — intermediary grievance mechanism, no dedicated de-indexing route