India's IT ministry to publish an AI regulation consultation paper, with deepfakes a stated focus

Speaking at the launch of the World Development Report 2026, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology would release a regulation-focused AI consultation paper within a month. He called safety "the most important point" and named deepfakes among the societal harms the paper would address, saying "the quality of deep fakes is increasing every day." He also said "the industry has to take the primary responsibility" for cybersecurity, safety, user harm, psychological harms and deepfakes, and referred to techno-legal solutions. Other themes he listed were a human-first approach, scaling AI, and inclusivity. MediaNama notes it is unclear whether the consultation will be public or limited to selected stakeholders.

Why it matters for digital humans: India is one of the largest markets for avatar-led marketing and synthetic presenters, and its courts have been granting personality-rights injunctions considerably faster than its regulators have been writing rules. A consultation paper is not a rule, and "within a month" is a ministerial timeline rather than a statutory one, so the date deserves scepticism. The direction is the signal: industry bearing primary responsibility, plus techno-legal enforcement, points toward provenance and labelling obligations landing on the platforms and tools that generate synthetic likenesses, not only on the people who misuse them.