Indian courts have spent more than a decade insisting that a printed call record, a chat export or a video file is not evidence until a certificate says it is. The rule, traced to Section 65-B of the Indian Evidence Act 1872 and now carried into Section 63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023, was restated by the Supreme Court in Pooranmal v State of Rajasthan in March 2026. There, call detail records were excluded and a murder conviction was set aside because the prosecution had not proved the certificate and had relied instead on the oral testimony of telecom nodal officers. This paper uses that decision as a vantage point to ask what the certificate can and cannot do. It argues that the certificate is a gatekeeping device for admissibility and a weak proxy for authenticity, and that Indian law has asked more often whether the paperwork was completed than whether the record can be trusted. Tracing the line of authority from Navjot Sandhu through Anvar, Shafhi Mohammad and Khotkar, the paper examines the legislative reworking of the certificate in the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, including the hash value and the expert’s declaration, and the decision of the Supreme Court in Pune Bar Association v Union of India upholding that design in May 2026. It then tests the regime against the problems of access, forensic capacity, custody and synthetic media. The paper proposes a calibrated model built around early certification at source, a statutory chain-of-custody code, funded access to expert certification for indigent accused, a preserved judicial power to cure defects, and a clear separation between the certificate as a threshold and authenticity as a question of weight.