India - E-mail Inadmissible

(8-11-04) Win some, lose some. ON one side we hear that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has stressed the importance of a highway proposal linking countries and laying optical fibre telecom link alongside it. Elsewhere, there is a tax tribunal that decides e-mail correspondence to be inadmissible as evidence. Apparently jarring, but it was in the Forbes Patvolk case that the Chennai tribunal had trashed e-mail. While the company was banking on the electronic confirmation received after rushing goods to a waiting ship, the Department was saying that the e-mail confirmation was "not signed by any authority". . . the Mumbai tribunal had, in 2002, decided that e-mail message was "an unsubstantiated and clumsy evidence... worthy of no reliance" when it was "sent without disclosing its source". Again, in the Ridhi Sidhi Furniture case, e-mail evidence was rejected "on the ground that the name of the sender of the e-mail was blocked in the copies supplied to importer and the address of person sending the quotation was also not known."

Comment: Interesting story how e-mail in electronic discovery in India was inadmissible.