Corporate Governance and Data Engineering: Navigating the Regulatory Landscape of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023

Anjana V

Published on: 2025-12-11

Abstract

India’s digital economy is expanding rapidly. This growth increases concerns about how corporations collect, engineer, and govern personal data. Existing literature largely examines corporate governance and data engineering in isolation, overlooking their convergence under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. This study addresses that gap by asking: How does the DPDP Act reshape corporate accountability? What governance duties and data engineering practices must organizations integrate to ensure lawful, ethical, and transparent data processing? The objective is to map the Act’s requirements onto corporate governance structures and the technical architecture of data systems to show how both domains must operate together. Using a doctrinal and analytical methodology grounded in regulatory theory and principles of privacy-by-design, the study applies a governance engineering theoretical framework that links board oversight, fiduciary duties, consent management, data minimization, secure architectures, and automated retention protocols into a unified compliance model. The findings reveal that organizations cannot meet DPDP obligations without embedding governance logic into data pipelines and engineering workflows. The implications indicate that effective compliance demands cross-functional alignment among legal teams, boards, data engineers, and system architects. The study concludes that the DPDP Act transforms data protection from a mere technical requirement into a core corporate governance function essential for accountability and trust in India’s digital economy.