Citizen Empowerment through an Authenticated Digital Public Evidence System: A Legal and Policy Study in the Indian Context

The widespread use of smartphones and digital communication technologies has significantly expanded the capacity of citizens to document interactions with public authorities. Audio, video, and other electronic records may contribute to transparency, grievance redressal, administrative accountability, and access to justice. However, the mere creation of a digital recording does not, by itself, establish its provenance, integrity, preservation history, or evidentiary reliability. This paper examines the gap between the legal recognition of electronic and digital records in India and the technological and institutional mechanisms available for preserving trustworthy records of citizen–State interactions. It combines an analysis of Indian evidence and technology law, relevant Supreme Court jurisprudence, an RTI-based inquiry into the institutional position of the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG), and a comparative examination of selected international approaches to digital evidence preservation and authentication. The study develops a central distinction between the technological capacity to record an interaction and the institutional capacity to preserve a trustworthy record of that interaction. The RTI material examined indicates that, within the specific institutional scope disclosed by the concerned DARPG Division, no specific rule, guideline, policy, proposal, or other record corresponding to the authenticated citizen-recording framework examined in this study was identified. This finding is not treated as proof of the absence of any related mechanism across the Government of India; rather, it provides documentary evidence of a potential institutional and policy gap within the scope of the inquiry. Against this background, the paper proposes the Citizen-Centric Authenticated Digital Public Evidence System (ADPES) as a policy-oriented techno-legal framework for strengthening the reliability and procedural utility of citizen-generated digital records. The proposed framework contemplates secure preservation, trusted timestamping, contextual and appropriately verified location information, cryptographic integrity protection, controlled retention, audit trails, and traceable retrieval, while incorporating evidentiary, constitutional, privacy, and data-protection safeguards. The paper argues that although Indian law provides an established framework for recognising and proving electronic and digital records, legal recognition alone does not provide a citizen-facing institutional infrastructure for preserving trustworthy records of interactions with public authorities. The proposed ADPES therefore addresses a distinct policy question concerning the conditions under which citizen-generated digital records may acquire more reliable provenance, integrity, and preservation history without altering the existing rules governing admissibility or evidentiary weight. The study concludes that any such framework should be approached incrementally through expert evaluation, technical standardisation, controlled pilot projects, privacy and data-protection safeguards, and independent oversight.