NEED FOR A COMPREHENSIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LEGISLATION IN INDIA: A COMPARATIVE LEGAL ANALYSIS WITH THE EUROPEAN UNION ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ACT

Abstract

Artificial intelligence has moved from the margins of Indian public administration to its operational core, informing credit decisions, welfare eligibility, predictive policing and content moderation, yet India continues to regulate it through instruments never designed for autonomous, self-learning systems. This paper examines whether India's existing legal architecture, principally the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, supplemented by non-binding instruments such as the NITI Aayog's National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence and the 2025 India AI Governance Guidelines, is adequate to address algorithmic opacity, automated discrimination and the absence of institutional accountability. It compares this fragmented domestic position with the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the first horizontal, risk-tiered AI statute in the world, which classifies systems as prohibited, high-risk, limited-risk or minimal-risk and attaches graduated obligations, conformity assessments and enforceable penalties to each tier. Employing doctrinal and comparative legal methodology, the paper reads Indian constitutional jurisprudence, particularly Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India and Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India, alongside the EU framework to argue that Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution already supply the normative foundation for a rights-anchored AI statute. It concludes that India should not transplant the EU Act wholesale but should adapt its risk-based methodology to a dedicated legislation calibrated to India's federal structure, institutional capacity and constitutional guarantees, and it proposes a concrete legislative architecture to that end.