DIGITAL DEATH AND SUCCESSION: REFORMING INDIAN SUCCESSION LAW FOR THE DIGITAL AGE

The individual is not erased from the physical plane by their demise; they simply shift their plane of existence. Bank accounts, cryptographically secure wallets, money-making YouTube channels, photos stored online, websites and social media profiles all persist after the biological occurrence referred to as “death” by the law, but there is virtually nothing in India’s inheritance laws on such items. The Indian Succession Act, 1925 and the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 were designed for a world where one had to inherit land, ornaments and Government securities and are still being used, primarily by analogy and inference, to inherit assets that are simply collections of digits stored in the servers of privately-owned and frequently foreign companies. This paper studies the void of legislation that surrounds “digital death” in India, surveys the tentative efforts of the courts at filling this void, discusses the issue in terms of the constitutional protection of privacy guaranteed under Article 21 and of property guaranteed under Article 300-A and carries out a comparative analysis of the fiduciary-access approach in the US, the universal succession approach in Germany and the nomination approach proposed by the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.