Digital Obscenity and Criminal Justice: Examining India’s Evolving Legal Framework for Pornographic Content in the Digital Age

The proliferation of digital culture has radically recast how obscenity is regulated and policed in India. The fast pace of internet explosion and the influx in web-based content consumption today, has kept scores of obscenity porn affected online crimes out of bounds for law enforcement agencies. This paper deals with India’s changing legal regime regarding pornography in digital age, including a variety of substantive laws such as Information Technology Act 2000 (with all amended version till 2008), Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 and contributions from relevant courts. It also delves into the function performed by the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986 and recent efforts such as The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill,2023 in content curation & responsibility. Through a new jurisprudence, state literature and comparative international experience I emphasise the ‘conflict’ of digital freedom, privacy and moral regulation. The paper ends with a call for the development of a harmonised and technologically-aware legal framework that would enable fundamental rights to be traded-off against the competing pressures of public decency and online security.