On January 26, 2026, reporting said Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is preparing to apply for a "consent manager" permit under India's Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Rules, positioning itself to manage and track consent for personal data processing in a structured way. Consent managers are meant to sit between individuals and organisations, enabling consent to be granted, withdrawn, and audited. For HR, this is not a side story: the same consent logic that governs customer data increasingly touches employee data flows too - recruitment, background checks, payroll vendors, benefits administrators, and internal systems that share records across entities and borders.
The emotional impact inside workplaces will be subtle but explosive. Employees rarely protest policy language. They protest the feeling of being watched, processed, and traded between systems they did not choose. The moment consent becomes a visible workflow, workers will ask sharper questions: "Who exactly has my medical claim data?", "Why does a vendor still have my Aadhaar copy?", "Why am I being asked to consent after the fact?" HR teams that are used to "getting forms signed" will discover that people can withdraw consent, demand clarity, and expect proof. And once employees realise consent can be tracked, they will also start testing whether HR's culture claims match its data habits.
Compliance-wise, DPDP is an operating model change, not a policy update. Consent managers make auditability real: who asked, what was agreed, when it changed, and whether processing continued anyway. That can expose the most common HR risk pattern - sprawling vendor ecosystems with weak retention discipline and informal data sharing. The fix is to treat employee data like regulated inventory: map every HR data category, define legal basis and purpose, minimise collection, set retention limits, and enforce role-based access. If a company chooses the "consent manager" route, HR must also prepare for a new kind of grievance: privacy disputes that feel personal and reputational, not transactional.
@ET, @PIB, @MediaNama
If an employee withdraws consent for a data use that HR considers "normal", who should win - operational convenience or individual control?
What is the one employee-data practice in your organisation that would not survive an honest consent audit?
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7The emotional impact inside workplaces will be subtle but explosive. Employees rarely protest policy language. They protest the feeling of being watched, processed, and traded between systems they did not choose. The moment consent becomes a visible workflow, workers will ask sharper questions: "Who exactly has my medical claim data?", "Why does a vendor still have my Aadhaar copy?", "Why am I being asked to consent after the fact?" HR teams that are used to "getting forms signed" will discover that people can withdraw consent, demand clarity, and expect proof. And once employees realise consent can be tracked, they will also start testing whether HR's culture claims match its data habits.
Compliance-wise, DPDP is an operating model change, not a policy update. Consent managers make auditability real: who asked, what was agreed, when it changed, and whether processing continued anyway. That can expose the most common HR risk pattern - sprawling vendor ecosystems with weak retention discipline and informal data sharing. The fix is to treat employee data like regulated inventory: map every HR data category, define legal basis and purpose, minimise collection, set retention limits, and enforce role-based access. If a company chooses the "consent manager" route, HR must also prepare for a new kind of grievance: privacy disputes that feel personal and reputational, not transactional.
@ET, @PIB, @MediaNama
If an employee withdraws consent for a data use that HR considers "normal", who should win - operational convenience or individual control?
What is the one employee-data practice in your organisation that would not survive an honest consent audit?
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