DIGITAL FORENSICS IN CORPORATE FRAUD INVESTIGATIONS: A LEGAL ANALYSIS UNDER THE INDIAN FRAMEWORK

Abstract

The migration of corporate fraud into cloud-distributed, encrypted, and machine-generated forms has outpaced the architecture of Indian evidence law. The Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023 (BSA) modernised the formal treatment of electronic records, granting them evidentiary parity and channelling their admissibility through a structured regime of certification, hash-value disclosure, and expert authentication. This paper argues that, although the BSA represents a genuine doctrinal advance over the Indian Evidence Act 1872 and although the Supreme Court has now confirmed the constitutional validity of its certification framework, the statute remains functionally underequipped for the distinctive evidentiary realities of digital corporate fraud — cloud and enterpriseresource-planning data outside any single custodian, end-to-end encrypted communications, crossborder storage beyond Indian process, and the emergent threat of AI-generated and deepfaked artefacts. The deficiency is therefore not constitutional but operational and institutional. Adopting a doctrinal method with a comparative dimension, the paper contends that India requires a targeted recalibration of Section 63 for distributed-data contexts, a dedicated cloud-forensics certification regime, and sustained judicial and prosecutorial capacity-building, without which the BSA's digital-first promise will fail at precisely the high-stakes intersection where reliability matters most.