Digital India Act (proposed replacement for the Information Technology Act, 2000)

The Information Technology Act, 2000 was enacted before social media, smartphones and generative AI. By 2023 the government had proposed to replace it with a Digital India Act, with the new law expected to address online safety, platform dominance and emerging technologies such as AI. MediaNama described the IT Act as 23 years old when MeitY convened the first public consultation on the new law.¹

That consultation took place in Bengaluru on 9 March 2023. MeitY made a presentation, and Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar spoke at the event. The Ministry said it planned to consult first on the principles underlying the Act and then on a draft bill.¹ MediaNama titled its account of the event 'Should There Be Safe Harbour At All?', reflecting Chandrasekhar's question whether intermediaries should keep blanket protection. A further stakeholder meeting was held in Mumbai in May 2023, and MediaNama's own MarketsNama event in Delhi on 19 May 2023 held a panel on how the Act could regulate online speech.²⁵

No draft bill followed. In December 2023 a MediaNama report on the deepfake advisories noted that the Digital India Act, which was to cover AI regulation, had been delayed until after 2024.³

According to MediaNama's report of the 9 March 2023 consultation, the proposed Act was to cover:¹

• Safe harbour. Chandrasekhar questioned whether intermediaries should keep blanket protection from liability for third-party content; he suggested conditional safe harbour tied to content-moderation duties, with prescriptive rules for some platforms.
• A regulator. The government wanted a 'light-touch' design and said it did not want a regulator so large that it scared away start-ups and innovators.
• An adjudicatory body. A specialised, dedicated body for civil and criminal cyber offences, giving accessible and timely remedies and building cyber jurisprudence.
• AI. Defining and regulating high-risk AI systems, with chapters on emerging technologies.
• Other areas. Online safety, child safety, platform dominance, an open internet, and digital government, including encryption and law-enforcement access to data.

On AI, the Minister said in May 2023 that the government intended to 'regulate AI to the prism of user harm', and, as MediaNama later recalled, that AI and high-risk intermediaries would be covered by rules under the Digital India Act rather than separate legislation.⁵⁶⁸ At MarketsNama in May 2023 panellists also discussed transparency in Section 69A blocking, the regulation of speech that is legal but harmful, and whether a platform should be liable for what a generative AI tool produces; an audience member raised that last question.²

Deepfakes were not a headline feature of the 2023 outline. They were addressed instead through advisories under the IT Rules after the Rashmika Mandanna video in November 2023, and through the synthetic-content amendment of February 2026.

No official reason has been given. MediaNama reported in December 2025 that the Act had not been introduced in Parliament, that no public draft had been released since 2023, and that references to it had faded from official AI announcements, with policy shifting to advisories, voluntary frameworks and the non-binding India AI Governance Guidelines released in November 2025.⁵ By June 2026 MediaNama described the Act as 'now-stalled'.⁶

The government's own statements on AI regulation have changed several times:⁶⁸

The November 2025 AI Governance Guidelines recommended that the IT Act, roughly two decades old, be reviewed and 'suitably amended' to define the roles of developers, deployers and users in the AI value chain, questioned whether the Section 79 safe harbour for 'intermediaries' could extend to AI systems, and suggested liability for developers and deployers who fail to exercise due diligence, while proposing sandboxes with 'reasonable legal immunities'.⁴

Safe harbour. The most contested proposal was to make safe harbour conditional. At the 2023 consultation Chandrasekhar suggested that immunity could be tied to content-moderation duties for some platforms, and the question whether the blanket immunity of Section 79 remained appropriate gave the event its headline.¹ Parliamentary committees later took up the same theme. The Standing Committee on Communications and IT recommended in September 2025 that MeitY develop concrete solutions on safe harbour in the context of fake news, and the Standing Committee on Home Affairs recommended in August 2025 that the IT Act be amended to impose harsher penalties and require intermediaries to compensate victims.⁹¹⁰ Congress member Ajay Maken, in a dissent note to the Home Affairs report, warned that changes to safe harbour could push platforms towards pre-emptive censorship and proposed that takedowns be triggered only by a court or quasi-judicial body, that an independent Digital Tribunal be created, and that the law align with the DPDP Act, 2023.¹¹

Executive rule-making in the interim. In the absence of a new statute, MeitY has regulated through advisories and amendments to the IT Rules. A draft amendment published on 30 March 2026 would require intermediaries to comply with MeitY clarifications, advisories, directions and SOPs in order to keep Section 79 protection. The Internet Freedom Foundation objected that such instruments are not subject to parliamentary scrutiny, need not be public and do not conform to the rule-making provisions of Section 87 of the IT Act.¹²

Absence of a draft. The lack of a published draft since 2023 means there is no text for stakeholders to respond to. MediaNama's account of the Minister's October 2026 remarks noted that it was not stated whether the planned AI framework would be a standalone law, an IT Act amendment or the Digital India Act, and that it was unclear whether the consultation would be public or limited to selected stakeholders.⁸

As of 15 October 2026 the Digital India Act exists only as an announced proposal. No draft bill has been published and none has been introduced in Parliament, according to the sources reviewed. The Ministry's attention has moved to AI regulation. In April 2026 MeitY set up an AI Governance and Economic Group to coordinate AI policy, whose membership is limited to ministers and senior officials of a few ministries and excludes the independent regulators proposed in the November 2025 guidelines.⁸ On 9 July 2026 Krishnan said stakeholder discussions would begin and drafting would follow.⁷ On 8 October 2026, speaking at the launch of the World Development Report 2026, Vaishnaw said he would ask the department to release a regulation-focused consultation paper within a month, starting with safety, and described deepfakes as a harm to society; he said AI could not be regulated only through a law and that a 'techno-legal solution' was needed, with industry carrying primary responsibility.⁸

Until a new statute is enacted, the IT Act, 2000 and the IT Rules, 2021, as amended in February 2026, remain India's legal framework for intermediaries and AI-generated content.