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As India prepares for the DPDPA Era, it has become necessary for organizations to explore the technical tools required to work towards compliance. FDPPI has already unveiled the Compliance frameworks, conducted many awareness sessions and also created many certified professionals.

It is time now to move to the next level of assisting the industry for compliance with assistance to understand and evaluate technical tools necessary for DPDPA Compliance.

It is natural that all existing international software solution providers who are already in the game serving the GDPR community are now eyeing the “Big and Beautiful Indian market” which is “Tariff Free”  and are tweaking their software to meet DPDPA requirements. Some of them are opening Indian subsidiaries to give their software a local touch.

Many Indian start ups are also venturing into the development of software for DPDPA Compliance including the Six shortlisted companies which are into the final round of development of the open source “Consent Management” software in the Coding Challenge.

Many large entities are however not relying on the external software suppliers and are developing their  own in-house software for compliance .

Already many of the professionals in the organizations have started gathering data and taking presentations from the vendors. Those who were already using some international products are experiencing the customization for DPDPA.

We as a community of Data Protection Professionals need to understand where the industry stands as of today, who are the serious players and what are their offers and what is the experience of the early users are. We know that these are early days and experience is sketchy. Many have only the marketing presentations to depend for their understanding. But this is early 2026 and we need to make an  assessment of what do we have today.

FDPPI has therefore launched the country’s first survey of DPDPA Compliance tools as a perception study from the users.

The Indian National Survey of DPDPA Compliance tools is an initiative launched by Naavi and FDPPI as a part of the celebration of the International Privacy Day of 2026.

The survey is now open and over the next one month till end February 2026, will collect the data. It will then be analysed and a report would be prepared.

Kindly access the survey here

Your views will be consolidated and all respondents will get a copy of the final report if they have shared their contact e-mail in the form

The tool manufactures can participate in the survey identifying their role as vendors of solutions. FDPPI would also give a one hour slot to them to present their software in one of the Jnaana Vardhini Sessions to the members of FDPPI  if interested.

Naavi

The first Indian National Survey of DPDPA Compliance tools in India is now open. FDPPI would request professionals with relevant information to contribute to this survey.

We are aware that a very few organizations in India have actually started implementation of DPDPA Compliance. Out of them many have implemented their in-house software development capability to meet the requirements. A few would have used the internationally available tools like OneTrust since they were perhaps already using them for GDPR compliance.

It is natural to expect that most of the big players claim that their software is also compatible with DPDPA Compliance.

To have the first hand account from the users of these products, FDPPI has opened this survey.

The Survey should have two benefits

1. All those who complete the survey are entitled to a copy of the report when ready. (Provided they have shared their contact details).
2. Additionally the survey has been so constructed that the completion of the form itself would give a fair idea of the requirements.

It is our endeavour to make the effort and time used worthy.

It is possible that  many are just aware of the products and may have taken demos but do not have a hands on experience. We have added them also in this survey so that the respondent’s base is wide.

Direct link to the survey is here:

Naavi

Way back in 2015, Naavi had initiated India’s first survey of Cyber Insurance.  It was a survey to ascertain the status of the industry at that point of time. We presume it was useful to the industry and today the industry has grown by leaps and bounds.

Now is the time for DPDPA Compliance and the entire industry is looking for appropriate tools for implementing Compliance. FDPPI has been doing its bit to assist the industry with its DGPSI Compliance framework. But the industry is eagerly looking forward to technical tools for data discovery, classification, consent Management and other requirements of compliance.

There are many international software products which are also claiming to have already customised for DPDPA. Most of them have substituted the key words such as Data Fiduciary for Data Controller but the skeleton of the engine is still the GDPR. Many Indian companies are trying to adopt DPDPA concepts into the GDPR  framework since changing over to another software is very cumbersome and expensive. Putting the DPDPA into the body created for GDPR is like an orthodox Indian soul getting into a foreigner’s body on reincarnation.

There are many Indian companies who are trying to build indigenous products and some of them (Not all)  have also been part of the MeitY exercise for developing an open source Consent Management Platform.

In this scenario, it is time for the launch of the First Indian National Survey of DPDPA Compliance tools.

FDPPI is therefore launching an open survey in this regard and is preparing to publish  the questionnaire as part of its “International Privacy Day” celebration.

At the same time Naavi is also launching his next book in E Form named “Wisdom Companion for Champions of DPDPA”

This book will be the fourth in the series of books released by Naavi starting with “Guardians of Privacy, a comprehensive  handbook on DPDPA 2023 and DGPSI, DGPSI, the perfect prescription for DPDPA Compliance and Taming the twin challenges of DPDPA And AI”.

These books trace the progressive development of Information and converting them into knowledge and implementation skills. The new book will cover the DPDPA Rules along with the recent additions to DGPSI family namely DGPSI-GDPR, DGPSI-HR and DGPSI-Data Processor.

The Print version may take a little while but the Kindle version will be ready by this week.

There is a rumour that the Government may pre-pone the implementation of DPDPA from 13th May 2027 to 13th may 2026. Whether it materializes or not, FDPPI is racing ahead with its activities to prepare the country for the DPDPA Compliance Era.

Naavi

FDPPI has set up a SIG to evaluate Privacy Management tools available for DPDPA Compliance. The SIG is currently collecting information from users and evaluating them. Several Indian solutions providers are providing brief demos  to the FDPPI members during the Jnaana Vardhini Sessions in 2026.

This exercise will continue and will  enable Indian solution providers to reach out to the professionals who are associated with FDPPI.

In this context, it is noted that Forrester Wave has published it’s Q4-2025 report which has  placed One  Trust, Securiti and Big ID as the leading software solutions for Privacy Management. Transcend, Relyance AI, Truyo and  Trust Arc have been  placed in the “Strong performers” category. Additionally a couple of more software like Ketch and Osano are also  in the list of contenders for the leadership.

The  FDPPI’s SIG for Tool evaluation will be making a special evaluation of these Nine tools from the DPDPA perspective.

We are aware that “Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches”. Hence to evaluate these solutions further,  the  SIG invites information from users in a survey to be set up for the purpose.

Participation is open to Indian Companies who are using and exploring to use any of these six tools. The Survey form would be distributed to the companies individually and a representative of FDPPI may contact  them for collecting their views. The report when generated would be shared with these participating companies free of charge. The results may also be separately collated into a document with anonymised attribution and released to others.

Organizations interested in participating in the survey and obtain a copy of the final report are requested to contact Naavi.

FDPPI may also share a complementary recommendation on how the usage of the tool can be customized for DGPSI compliance.

Naavi

Most of us are familiar with the “Periodic Table” used in Chemistry to group elements into different groups for better understanding  their properties and also to predict some missing members of a pattern.

Now Mr  Martin Keen of IBM Technology has brought out an interesting presentation of a “Periodic Table for AI Terms” in this video

The video tries to briefly explain and categorize the terms used in the AI domain into a table of 4 rows and five columns.

The Four rows are Primitive, Compositions, Deployment and Emerging terms.

The five columns are five groups  of terms namely, Reactive, Retrieval, Orchestrations, Validation and Models .

It is an excellent  attempt to assist decoding of the technical terms used by the industry.

A clean table for better readability is here:

Naavi

When CBDC was introduced in India (Refer: “Article CBDC Will change the World Economic Order” in 2022, we had indicated that the CBDC-W was useful in substituting the SWIFT mechanism and can be extended to Exporters and Importers. We had however held that CBDC-R for retail use may not be that useful since in India we already have the UPI system.

Much before the concept of CBDC emerged, we had commented in our article in 2016 ” Here is how the Currency shortage can Vanish in a jiffy with Digi-Real Currency“.  We had also explored in 2022, the impact of Data Protection Bill 2022 on CDC in our article “CBDC or E Rupee and the Data Protection Bill 2022” .

The concepts discussed in these articles remain relevant today and gains further strength not only because DPDPA has been enacted but also because India has now actively begun cooperating with the BRICS countries to introduce a currency exchange mechanism through the CBDCs of each country.

Watch the video from PGurus in this regard.

The video discusses the possible exchange system where settlements between the BRICS Countries may move through a central exchange currency which could be the CBDC-Rupee. In this system any payment to be made between Country A to Country B  will first be converted from the importer country to E-Rupee and then E-Rupee to the CBDC of the Exporter country.

The Clearing mechanism can be owned by any one of the participating country or  a consortium of countries like the “Board of CBDCs” which can be created to replace SWIFT.

At the same time, a thought arises if CBDC-R may also be  made relevant by creating an exchange mechanism within India between the E-Rupee in retail with the UPI system.

Currently in the UPI system, the requests between the payer and the receiver is routed through the NPCI to the respective banks who initiate the bank to bank transfer of money. These transactions directly debit or credit the rupee balances in the account.

In case the customer keeps the funds in E-Rupee form and created a link between his normal account with a Zero Balance,  then there can be a E-Rupee Exchange mechanism where by the UPI request can be directly routed to the E-Rupee Clearing house along with the destination Bank identity where the credit can be  given either to the E-Rupee account of the receiver or to his regular account.

In such  a system all existing Checking accounts would be like “BSPs” or “Banking  Service Providers” where digital instructions pass through automatically. Any need to convert the E-Rupee  into physical  cash can be routed through the regular account where as Bank to Bank transfers can be conducted through E-Rupee exchange system.

We need to explore if such a system may be helpful in reducing Banking costs and reducing the frauds.

Request views of experts on whether this makes sense.

Naavi