India amended its 2021 IT Rules to require social platforms to remove government-flagged content within three hours, permanently label “synthetically generated” information, and accept liability for unlabeled synthetic content, including bans on certain synthetic categories.

The three-hour deadline forces platforms to run 24/7 India-specific moderation and legal escalation, increasing compliance cost and raising the risk of service restrictions or penalties if response workflows miss the window. Permanent, non-removable labeling creates a hard product requirement for provenance/watermarking across uploads and re-shares, pushing platforms to implement detection and labeling at scale rather than relying on user self-disclosure. Making platforms responsible for unlabeled synthetic content shifts legal risk onto intermediaries, incentivizing stricter pre-publication checks, tighter creator tooling, and more aggressive removal/visibility limits for suspected AI media in India. The amendments take effect immediately upon publication, compressing implementation timelines for global platforms operating in India.