Right to Be Forgotten in India: Can You Really Erase Your Digital Past? : Author: Khushi Goswami
You've probably got something you wish the internet would just forget. Maybe it’s a single awkward photo from years back, an old FIR that never went anywhere/an old court case, or a comment/some rant u posted years ago on a forum that shut down long ago but somehow still shows up when someone searches your name. Before search engines existed, none of this really mattered, since people forgot and records simply gathered dust.
Introduction
You've probably got something you wish the internet would just forget. Maybe it’s a single awkward photo from years back, an old FIR that never went anywhere/an old court case, or a comment/some rant u posted years ago on a forum that shut down long ago but somehow still shows up when someone searches your name. Before search engines existed, none of this really mattered, since people forgot and records simply gathered dust.
Now the same stuff stays online forever. It gets indexed by search engines, ppl take screenshots, and copies end up on severs no one really owns or controls. In short, everything you've ever posted or been mentioned in gets copied and stored somewhere you will never know about.
That’s the whole reason the right to be forgotten exists: some legal way to make companies delete information about you once it stops being relevant.
That’s exactly the reason so many people across the world want a right to be forgotten. In India, this right is still a work in progress. There is no single clean law you can point to, only court rulings and a law that is only partly switched on.
The Courts Got There Before Parliament Did
Europe sorted this question out years ago. Back in 2014, the Google Spain case gave EU citizens a fairly clear right to have search results removed about them, and later codified in the General Data Protection Regulation. So unlike the European Union where the right to be forgotton has been recognized for almost a decade, India has no comparable standalone statute. We never passed anything similar.
What we actually have instead started with the Supreme Court's Puttaswamy judgment in 2017, which ruled that privacy is part of the fundamental right to life and liberty under Article 21. After that, High Courts in Karnataka, Kerala, Orissa, Delhi and several other states soon began treating that ruling as kinda precedent. They used that ruling to order names to be hidden from old judgments, directing that matrimonial cases pulled from search results, and requiring the removal of news reports about people who were later acquitted. These are good outcomes for the person involved, but every court reasons it out differently, and a ruling from one High Court does not bind the rest of the country. What you have is a pile of similar decisions pointing the same way. So the law ends up feeling fragmented rather than something really settled.
What the DPDP Act Really Gives You
Then, in 2023, India passed its first proper data protection law, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act. It introduced something called the right to erasure, and while it sounds like the right to be forgotten, it is not quite.
Under this right, any company holding your personal information, called a data fiduciary under the Act, is supposed to delete it once that information is no longer needed for its original purpose, or once you withdraw your consent, unless another law requires the company to keep it. That is genuinely helpful, but that still falls short of a full fledged right to be forgotten because the limits do matter.
You do not get the right to move your data elsewhere, and you cannot challenge a decision an algorithm made about you or a private right to sue the company. The rules under this Act were only notified in November 2025, and they are being rolled out in stages that will not finish until May 2027, so a large part of this right remains, for now, theoretical.
One Court Went Further Than the Law Did
In 2026, the Delhi High Court went further than the DPDP Act was willing to. The judges said the right to be forgotten comes directly from the dignity and privacy protections already built into Article 21, and that it applies to private companies too, not only to government bodies. They also proposed a balancing test for future cases, weighing the harm of leaving certain information public against whatever public interest exists in keeping it accessible.
It is probably the most carefully reasoned judgment on this subject that India has produced so far, but it is still just one High Court's opinion, and Parliament hasn’t yet brought in a comprehensive statute that sets out such a test. Put simply, government has not stepped in to make it a nationwide rule.
Where This Right Simply Will Not Help You
None of this means you can erase anything you want. Courts have consistently refused erasure in certain situations, usually for good reason. If you were convicted of a serious crime, involved in financial fraud, or a public official caught in corruption, no court is going to wipe that off the record for you. Judges tend to prefer masking your name rather than deleting the whole record, since that protects your privacy without erasing history the public may genuinely want remembered. They generally take the view that open justice and freedom of the press outweigh the individual’s desire to have the information removed.
Put simply, open justice and press freedom usually win in these situations. And even if a court does side with you, getting something removed from the internet is another problem altogether. Content gets copied onto servers outside anyone's legal reach, so removing it from one search engine does nothing if it still appears elsewhere. Besides, trying to bury can sometimes have the totally opposite effect - known as the “Streisand effect” - where an attempt to suppress information only brings more attention to it.
So Can You Actually Erase Your Past?
Only partly, and that is the only honest answer. The courts give you a broader argument that can work well in individual cases, but their approach is still not consistent across the country. In practice that means the outcome can depend a lot on what kind of information you are trying to get removed and where you take your case. If you are dealing with outdated personal information sitting with some company, you have a reasonable chance of getting it removed. That is probably where the right is most useful in everyday situations. But if you are dealing with a criminal record, a matter the public genuinely cares about, or something already spread across many websites, do not expect much Once information has a strong public interest angle or has already been copied & circulated widely, getting it erased becomes nearly impossible.
Until parliament passes a complete law along the lines of the GFPR, or the Supreme Court settles this once and fall all, people who want to erase their digital pass will have to rely on statutory erasure requests, High court petitions, and platform complaint systems. For now, that gives ppl some options, but it is still far from a complete solution to a problem the internet has made much harder to undo. Your options in India will stay what they are today: a set of overlapping remedies that sometimes work, rather than one clear right you can simply invoke.
References
1. Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1 (Supreme Court of India, nine judge bench, 24 August 2017).
2. Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v. Agencia Espanola de Proteccion de Datos (AEPD), Case C 131/12 (Court of Justice of the European Union, 13 May 2014).
3. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (Act No. 22 of 2023), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.
4. Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025, notified vide Gazette Notification No. G.S.R. 846(E), 13 November 2025, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
5. Press Information Bureau, Government of India, “Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Rules, 2025,” press release dated 14 November 2025.
6. Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v. Union of India and Connected Matters, Neutral Citation 2026:DHC:4891, Delhi High Court, judgment dated 29 May 2026 (Datta, J.).