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.
Though Mr. The costs rise sharply in regulated sectors. Whether that spending is proportionate to the risk it addresses depends on the source. Viplav Baxi, who runs AmplifiU, a pedagogy-focused platform for teachers, pushed back on the framing that compliance is crushing the sector. Mr. Mr. Baxi described the practical tangle this creates for school-facing platforms. Students cannot legally consent for themselves, so parents must, and it remains unclear how that consent is captured by the platform directly or funnelled through the school. He also pointed to a structural asymmetry: a student objecting to activity tracking embedded in a learning management system has little real choice, since the school, not the child, controls what tools are deployed in the classroom. Retention is the other flashpoint. Mr. AI-driven features compound the complexity. Any AI conversation on a learning platform now requires disclosure of which AI provider processes it, where the data goes, and how quickly it is purged, sometimes within a day of the interaction.
Jana declined to put a hard number on the cost, he confirmed that figures circulating in the industry, roughly ₹3 lakh to ₹8 lakh a month for a general-purpose platform, are “a good figure. Baxi called for deeper scrutiny of how the average ₹3-8 lakh has come about.
“For a bank to adhere to the DPDP Act, the cost will go up to ₹12-15 lakh,” he said, and healthcare clients handling medical data push costs higher still. “I do not think there is too much of a hurdle, it is just a law that needs to be implemented,” he said, arguing the technical piece — telling users what data is held, why, and for how long, then letting them withdraw permission — “is not technically that complicated. “You should get deeper into the cost structure, why they are saying that,” he said, noting that scale — a platform with 1,000 students versus 1 million — changes the calculus, as does how much of that spending was already necessary good governance that firms had simply deferred. He said that it is not clear how the approval mechanism will work at the school level, but eventually schools will have to document consent even for data collected offline. Jana said his firm now separates personal data from learning data — quiz scores, certificates — assigning each its own retention window rather than storing everything indefinitely, a shift he called overdue.
