The Dichotomy of the 65B Certificate: Analysing Trends with Regard to the Authentication of Electronic Evidence in India

It is a known fact as to how intricately interwoven electronic forms of communication and electronic media are in all aspects of life in the 21st century, including governance, crime and justice. This is widely recognised, and our reliance on technology is only bound to increase.Yet, development in legal literature does not occur synchronously. Where the pace oftechnology increases with time, legal developments that should ideally be concomitant, fall behind and often cause confusion, not only among the parties to the dispute in question, but also to lower Courts that seek to apply such principles in the future. One such nobly motivated legislative development is the 65B Certificate, the legal position with regard to which has seen multiple alternating views on the question of its mandatory nature with the latest developments delivered by the Supreme Court in the judgments of Shafhi Muhammad (2018) and Arjun Khotkar (2020). This paper discusses the changes that regulations dealing with the authentication of electronic evidence have undergone, post the introduction of the Section, analyses probable causes of the same and concludes with the contention that the current position of law may be inadequate