The Certification Ceiling: Rethinking Section 63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam in the Face of Autonomous AI-Generated Evidence

On 1 July 2024, the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 was replaced by the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (BSA), 2023, with Section 65B giving way to Section 63 as the statutory gateway for secondary electronic evidence. Both provisions rest on a common assumption: that a human custodian can certify the operation of the machine generating a record. This premise breaks down when the “machine” is an autonomous, deep-learning system whose outputs are emergent, stochastic, and mathematically blurred even to its developers. This paper argues that Section 63, as upheld by the Supreme Court of India in Pune Bar Association v. Union of India (2026), addresses the integrity of electronic records after creation, but not the reliability of autonomously generated records. Drawing on the United States’ Daubert-Federal Rule of Evidence 702 framework and Andrea Roth’s theory of “machine testimony,” it contends that the custodial-certificate model is doctrinally unfitting for generative artificial intelligence, implicating the fair-trial guarantee under Article 21. It proposes a supplementary “Glass-Box” verification track incorporating explainability metrics, statistical error-rate disclosure, and court-appointed assessors.