The Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) changes the legal obligations around how Indian businesses collect, store and use personal data, and a lot of the practical advice circulating focuses on legal language rather than what actually has to change in your software. Here is the practical side.
Consent has to be genuine, not buried
Consent for collecting personal data needs to be clear, specific, and given before data is collected, not assumed through a pre-ticked box buried in terms and conditions. If your signup or checkout flow currently treats consent as a formality, that flow needs to change, with a clear record of what was consented to and when.
Data has to be deletable, not just deactivated
Users have a right to request their data be deleted, and your systems need to actually support that, not just mark an account as inactive while the underlying data sits untouched in your database indefinitely. This often requires real engineering work if your data is spread across multiple systems (your main app, your analytics tools, your email marketing platform) that were never built with a "delete this person everywhere" capability in mind.
Breach notification needs a real process
If personal data is compromised, there are notification obligations, which means you need to actually be able to detect a breach quickly and know what data was affected, not discover it weeks later with no clear picture of what happened.
Data minimisation: only collect what you actually need
A common gap is software that collects far more personal data than the business actually uses, simply because a signup form template included every field by default. Reviewing what you actually collect and removing fields you do not have a genuine, current use for reduces both your compliance exposure and your risk if a breach ever happens.
What this means practically
DPDPA compliance is not primarily a legal document sitting in a drawer, it is a set of actual technical requirements: consent flows, deletion capability, access logging, and breach detection built into how your software actually works. Treating it as a one-time checkbox rather than an ongoing engineering requirement is where most businesses will run into real problems.
If you are not sure whether your current systems actually meet these requirements, our security and compliance team can audit your actual setup against what DPDPA requires.