India DPDP Act 2023 LB-001 — Consent Quality & Management

What this control requires

Implement a consent management system ensuring all consents meet DPDPA requirements: free from duress, specific (per-purpose), informed, unconditional, unambiguous, and expressed through clear affirmative action. Prohibit: pre-ticked boxes, bundled consent, and retrospective consent. Maintain immutable, timestamped consent logs for the duration of processing. Objective: Ensure the quality and validity of all consents collected, making all consent-based processing lawful and auditable.

In plain English

Implement a consent management system ensuring all consents meet DPDPA requirements: free from duress, specific (per-purpose), informed, unconditional, unambiguous, and expressed through clear affirmative action. In practice, this means you can prove you maintain consent quality-level controls on a defined cadence.

Why it matters

Penalties under the DPDP Act reach ₹250 crore per instance of significant non-compliance, and the Act applies extra-territorially to any entity processing personal data of individuals in India in connection with offering goods or services.

This control is rated critical in the source catalogue. Treat gaps here as production incidents in the risk register, not housekeeping.

What an auditor looks for

Indian DPAs and statutory auditors will look for: documented consent capture and revocation flows, a designated Data Protection Officer (for Significant Data Fiduciaries), breach-notification workflows tied to Data Protection Board notification timelines, and Records of Processing that match the consent notice the user saw.

Within Lawful Basis, the assessor will trace your implementation back to the catalogue reference (Control LB-001) and look for objective evidence on the latest two assessment cycles.

How to implement

Policy Management

Docs. Keep each policy in version-controlled Markdown alongside the code that implements it; ship a signed PDF snapshot at each annual review and link the SHA into the SoA.

Operational checklist

• Maintain. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Implement. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Ensure. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Scope: consent quality, management.

Evidence to collect

• Policy Document. A signed and version-controlled policy / standard / procedure document.

Signed policies, procedures, and registers document the safeguard. Focus: Consent Quality & Management.

Common pitfalls

• Policies that no engineer has read; the version in Confluence drifts from the version that's actually being enforced.

How it maps to other frameworks

Computed from shared tags, control component and key-operation subjects — handy when you are reconciling controls across an audit.

• ISO/IEC 27701:2025 A.1.2.5 — Obtain & record consent
• SOC 2 (2017 TSC) P3.2 — Consent Management for Personal Information Collection
• GDPR Article 6 — Lawfulness of processing
• ISO/IEC 27001:2022 A.5.5 — Contact with authorities
• NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 PL-2(3) — Plan And Coordinate With Other Organizational Entities

Related controls in India DPDP Act 2023

• Control DS-005 — Consent Withdrawal Mechanism
• Control SC-002 — Data Principal Identification & Guardian Consent Management
• Control LB-002 — Legal Obligation Processing Register
• Control TR-002 — Multi-Language Consent Interface
• Control LB-003 — Emergency & Public Interest Processing Protocol
• Control LB-005 — Employee Privacy Notice & HR Data Governance

References

• Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (India) — India DPDP Act 2023
• Catalogue identifier: Control LB-001

Topics: governance riskdata protectionprivacy managementpolicy management