ALGORITHMIC EVIDENCE IN THE DOCK: EXAMINING THE ADMISSIBILITY OF AIGENERATED RECORDS UNDER THE BHARATIYA SAKSHYA ADHINIYAM, 2023 AND THE CASE FOR A DEDICATED NORMATIVE FRAMEWORK

Abstract

What may a court lawfully treat as established fact, and how ought it arrive at that conclusion? These are old questions, but artificial intelligence has given them a sharper edge than they have had for some time. The Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA) replaced the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 from 1 July 2024 - India's most significant reconfiguration of evidentiary law since the colonial period. Its reforms are real: electronic records are treated more coherently, expert evidence is better structured, and the certification regime is clarified. Yet the BSA was designed to answer a prior generation of problems. When Parliament enacted it, the governing concern was whether a stored or transmitted digital record had been altered in transit. Today's courts face something different: evidence that a machine did not merely store or convey but actively produced. A deepfake reconstructing a conversation, a recidivism score computed from demographic proxies, a DNA mixture resolved by probabilistic software - none of these maps cleanly onto the BSA's certification-based architecture. This article contends that the existing framework is both doctrinally inadequate and practically unworkable for this category of evidence. It draws on comparative law from the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, together with scholarship in AI governance and legal epistemology, to develop a normative framework resting on three claims: that AI-generated evidence warrants a structured judicial reliability inquiry before admission; that Parliament must carve out a discrete statutory category with mandatory disclosure requirements; and that Articles 14, 20, and 21 of the Constitution place substantive limits on the judicial deployment of algorithmic outputs. The article closes with specific proposals for legislative amendment and practice directions.