DPDP Act: are compliance costs of privacy law crushing ed-tech businesses?
The article examines the financial burden placed on Indian ed-tech companies due to compliance requirements under the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act. Businesses are struggling to balance the high costs of data privacy infrastructure with the need to remain profitable.
Why it matters
It illustrates the tension between implementing robust data privacy regulations and the economic viability of small to medium-sized technology startups.
When Mihir Jana’s IT team sits down with a new client these days, the conversation no longer starts only with features or pricing. Instead, they ask more about where the data is going and how long it will be kept.
Mr. Jana is the managing director of EDZLearn Services, a Delhi-based company that builds learning management systems and AI-driven platforms for schools, universities, banks, and other institutions. Since India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act began taking effect, he said, “the entire ballgame has changed” for the ed-tech industry his company serves.
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Passed by the Parliament in August 2023 and rolled out in phases since the DPDP Rules were notified in November 2025, the law is reshaping how education technology companies collect, store and delete the personal data of schoolchildren, some of India’s youngest and most vulnerable internet users.
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