Excerpt from Rediff Moneynews Article, Published on November 26, 2025
India’s new digital compliance regime is set to change how companies treat personal information — and at the heart of this shift is Data mapping. Under freshly notified Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP) rules, businesses must now prioritise discovering and documenting what data they already hold.
According to experts such as Vikram Jeet Singh of BTG Advaya, the first step under the new regulation will be identifying datasets — including personal and sensitive user information — and mapping who has access to it, where it is stored, and how it flows through systems. This exercise is not just a legal formality. Because the DPDP regime is consent – based, companies will also need to re – engineer systems and workflows so that consent collection, record – keeping, and user – rights mechanisms become part of the technical architecture.
For many organisations — from startups to large firms and financial institutions — this translates into substantial compliance effort. They must deploy consent – management tools, rework backend architecture, and embed privacy by design. Significant investments in IT infrastructure and process re – engineering are expected in the coming months.
The reasoning is simple: until businesses know exactly what data they hold and how it moves — that is, unless they have completed thorough Data mapping — they cannot guarantee compliance with the obligations under DPDP. That includes requirements around data minimisation, secure storage, access control, consent tracking, and — eventually — data retention or deletion policies.
Moreover, this step will be critical for companies handling sensitive categories — such as children’s data — or large volumes of personal data that fall under the definition of “significant data fiduciary”. The new framework makes it clear: Data mapping is not optional. It is the first building block in India’s push for a privacy – centric digital ecosystem.
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