The Right to be Forgotten in the Age of Generative AI: Privacy Law’s New Frontier

The advent of significant language models and generative AI technologies has resulted in a crisis in jurisprudence regarding Indian privacy law. The Government of India’s new “Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP)” represents an ambitious first step to create codified rights for individuals who own their own data, including a new right to erasure; however, the structure of the DPDP indicates a profound disconnect between the existing law and the realities of data persistence that exist in AI-enabled systems. This paper examines the friction between India’s reformed criminal law trinity, the “Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS), the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (BNSS) and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA)” and the operational logic of generative AI systems whose training corpora are functionally irreversible. Grounded in the constitutional jurisprudence established by the Supreme Court in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India¹ and measured against the European Court of Justice’s seminal ruling in Google Spain², the paper argues that India’s legislative response suffers from what this paper terms ‘temporal regulatory arbitrage’a structural lag between the pace of AI deployment and the capacity of democratic institutions to formulate adequate responses. Drawing on an empirical analysis of India’s legislative record, comparative statutory frameworks from the EU, China and Brazil and the nascent Indian judicial engagement with the right to be forgotten, the paper concludes with targeted policy recommendations that reconcile the imperatives of algorithmic accountability with India’s developmental aspirations in artificial intelligence.