जब इंसान करवट लेता है तो दिशा बदल जाती है, और जब वक्त करवट लेता है तो दशा बदल जाती है ...

A $25.6 million wire fraud. Not a single line of code hacked. Every "colleague" on the video call was an AI-generated ghost. In my latest piece for *The Hindu BusinessLine*, I examine what happens when the foundational assumption of our legal and financial systems — that seeing is believing — no longer holds. We are entering the age of Synthetic Truth. Generative Adversarial Networks have made deepfakes statistically indistinguishable from reality. The forensic fightback — Error Level Analysis, sensor noise verification, Multi-Signal Forensics — is real, but it is a response to a threat that our legal architecture has not yet caught up with. The Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 was a significant step — elevating electronic records to primary evidence, mandating cryptographic hashing. But it validates how evidence was captured and stored. It says nothing about whether that evidence was AI-generated in the first place. Neither the BNS nor the BSA assigns criminal liability for creating deepfakes to deceive a court — a gap the Supreme Court itself flagged in Pune Bar Association v. Union of India (May 2026) but declined to resolve. Deepfakes are not a technology problem. They are an existential threat to the rule of law. If our legal systems cannot establish truth, they drown in a sea of doubt. We need a dedicated statutory instrument — a Digital Forensic Evidence Act or a targeted BSA amendment — with a notified National Digital Forensic Authority empowered to validate AI-generated evidence before it reaches a courtroom. The architecture of truth must be every bit as sophisticated as the machinery of illusion. Read the full piece: thehindubusinessline.com/opi… #DeepfakeDetection #AIGovernance #DigitalForensics #RuleOfLaw #Cybersecurity #BharatiyaSakshyaAdhiniyam #ArtificialIntelligence #LegalTech #DataPrivacy #CorporateGovernance @GoI_MeitY @DSCI_Connect @NFSU_Official @ugc_india @nasscom @ASSOCHAM4India @PIB_India

When a local police station receives a report about a digital financial fraud, the investigation almost immediately runs into international borders. The individual carrying out the scheme might be sitting in one country, the stolen funds might land in a second, the mobile phone used to execute the transaction might operate in a third, and the physical server hosting the digital trails could sit in a fourth. In these cases, tracking down the perpetrator is rarely the primary hurdle for law enforcement. Instead, the real race against time is preserving the electronic evidence long enough for the legal process to catch up. This practical bottleneck explains why India signed the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime. Joining the treaty gives the nation a structured way to plug its domestic legal frameworks into a global network for international cooperation. Formally adopted by the UN in 2024, the Convention establishes unified international rules for investigating offenses, prosecuting suspects, and securing digital proof before it disappears. The agreement will officially enter into force 90 days after 40 signatory nations ratify it. This implementation timeline creates an important window of opportunity for Indian authorities to align domestic institutions rather than scrambling after the treaty takes effect. Read my views, lnkd.in/p/gYRhctN5

India's insurance industry is about to get a new piece of plumbing. The proposed Public Insurance Registry* promises to knit together data that today sits scattered across dozens of insurers' incompatible systems, a shared backbone meant to help regulators supervise the market, help insurers serve customers faster, and help policyholders move between providers without losing their history. On paper, it is hard to object to. In practice, its difficulty will only become visible once the ribbon is cut. My views, lnkd.in/p/g6UzUVz5