India’s AI Governance Guidelines and the DPDP Act: What the Seven Sutras Mean for Data Fiduciaries
India chose voluntary AI governance and binding data protection. The AI Governance Guidelines released at the AI Impact Summit 2026 set seven principles and three new institutions — but the enforceable obligations on AI systems still come from the DPDP Act.
While India’s AI Governance Guidelines establish seven foundational principles (trust, fairness, accountability, understandable by design, safety, innovation, and inclusivity), the statutory teeth governing how AI systems ingest and process personal data reside squarely in the DPDPA 2023.
For engineering and compliance leaders, aligning AI governance with DPDPA means maintaining verifiable provenance of training datasets, honouring erasure and opt-out requests, and ensuring algorithmic systems do not cause harm to Data Principals.
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