Section 25 — Members and Officers to be Public Servants

Section 24 covers who gets appointed to run the Board's day-to-day operations. Section 25 attaches a specific legal status to everyone the Act has put in that position — Chairperson, Members, officers and employees alike, without distinction between them.

Deemed public servants, but only while acting under the Act

The Chairperson, Members, officers and employees of the Board are deemed, when acting or purporting to act in pursuance of the Act's provisions, to be public servants within the meaning of Section 21 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860. Two things follow from the specific wording. First, this status is scoped to conduct "in pursuance of provisions of this Act" — it isn't a blanket public-servant status that follows a Board employee into every unrelated context of their life. Second, being a public servant under the IPC cuts both ways: it exposes these individuals to the IPC's offences specifically directed at public servants — bribery, corruption, breach of official duty — while also giving them whatever legal protections attach to acting in that capacity, alongside the good-faith protection Section 35 separately provides to the Board, its Chairperson and its Members and officers.

Why this matters in practice

For a Data Fiduciary or Data Principal dealing with the Board, this section is mostly background architecture rather than something that changes how a complaint or breach intimation gets handled. Its practical significance runs the other way — toward accountability of the Board's own staff. Anyone attempting to bribe or improperly influence a Board Member or officer in connection with a proceeding is dealing with someone who counts as a public servant under the IPC for that purpose, with the criminal exposure that status carries.

Illustration: if a Data Fiduciary under investigation offered a Board officer money to overlook evidence in a pending inquiry, that officer's status as a deemed public servant under Section 25 is what brings the IPC's bribery provisions to bear on the exchange — a status that wouldn't apply to an equivalent employee of an ordinary private company.

How Section 25 connects to the rest of the Act

Section 35 sits alongside this section as the Act's other integrity-and-protection provision for the Board — Section 35 shields good-faith action from suit or prosecution, while Section 25 is what brings the IPC's public-servant offences into play in the first place. Section 24 is what creates the officer and employee roles this section's status attaches to.