India · K-12, Test Prep, Skilling and EdTech
Student and parent terms, instructor agreements, content licensing, and the children’s data protection obligations that carry the strictest penalties in India’s entire data protection law. Legal support for K-12, test prep, skilling, and higher-ed platforms.
K-12, test prep, skilling, school-partnered, or a tutoring marketplace, share the details, especially whether you serve users under 18, and we’ll come back with a clear scope and fixed fee.
If your users include anyone under 18, and in EdTech that’s usually most of them, you’re operating under the strictest data protection obligations in Indian law, not the general rules that apply to most consumer apps. Add instructor relationships, content licensing, and an industry that regulators and advertising bodies have actively scrutinised for years, and EdTech legal work looks different from a typical consumer startup. Also refer to our page on startup lawyer in India
Under Section 9 of the DPDP Act, anyone under 18 is treated as a child, a uniform national threshold, stricter than GDPR’s 16 or the US COPPA standard of 13. If your platform processes a child’s personal data, name, academic records, attendance, learning patterns, or anything else, you need verifiable parental consent before you process it at all.
Three restrictions apply absolutely, regardless of what parents consent to and regardless of whether it’s core to your product: no behavioural tracking or monitoring of children, no targeted advertising directed at children, and no processing likely to cause detrimental effect to a child’s wellbeing. A learning app that personalises ads based on a child’s activity, or a gamified product using engagement-maximising design on minors, sits directly in the zone regulators are watching. Penalty exposure for violations runs up to ₹200 crore.
Where you provide services to students through a school, the school is generally the Data Fiduciary and your platform sits as the Data Processor, with the school responsible for consent and your platform contractually bound to process data only within DPDP-compliant limits. Getting this contractual allocation right with your school partners is not optional paperwork, it’s the thing that determines who’s actually liable if something goes wrong.
The Advertising Standards Council of India’s guidelines, revised in 2022 with EdTech specifically in mind, restrict language most growth teams reach for by default: no guaranteed outcomes or success claims, no fear-based messaging built around a child “falling behind,” and marketing that accurately represents time commitment and realistic results. This isn’t a generic advertising code, it exists because of how this sector has historically marketed to parents, and it’s actively enforced.
Course content is usually a platform’s core asset, and ownership isn’t always as clean as founders assume. We make sure content created by instructors, whether employed, contracted, or freelance, is properly assigned or licensed to the company, and put clear terms around what happens to that content if an instructor relationship ends. We also handle trademark registration for your platform and course brands.
No-cost EMI and financing partnerships for course fees have drawn real regulatory scrutiny in India, since these arrangements typically run through an NBFC or lending partner and fall within RBI’s digital lending framework. If your EdTech platform offers financing, the underlying lending relationship needs the same regulatory care a FinTech company would give it, see our FinTech startup lawyer page for what that involves.
Clear terms for the account holder, with proper handling for accounts belonging to or used by minors.
The actual consent mechanism your platform uses, built to meet the DPDP Act’s verifiable standard, not a single tick-box.
Contractor terms, IP assignment for created content, and confidentiality, tailored to how your platform actually engages educators.
Clear, compliant terms given how heavily this sector has been scrutinised over aggressive sales and difficult cancellations.
Data processing roles, liability allocation, and commercial terms for B2B2C and school-partnered models.
Terms for licensing content in from publishers or creators, or out to other platforms and institutions.
Investors in this sector scrutinise data protection and advertising compliance closely, given the industry’s history. We draft term sheets, SAFEs, and shareholders’ agreements for EdTech founders, and can help you get genuinely diligence-ready on the compliance side before investors start asking.
My Legal Pal is led by Prakhar Rai, an advocate enrolled with the Bar Council of India and an alumnus of NLSIU Bangalore, with a Master of Business Laws and 10+ years of experience, working with EdTech founders on the compliance questions this sector can’t afford to get wrong.
Our full startup legal practice, all stages.
For EdTech platforms offering course fee financing.
Check your platform’s data compliance gaps.
Tell us about your platform, and we’ll come back with a clear scope and fixed fee.
