Section 31 — Alternate Dispute Resolution

Section 28 sets out the full inquiry machinery the Board can run once a complaint reaches it. Section 31 gives the Board a way to avoid running that machinery at all, where it thinks the underlying dispute is capable of being settled between the parties directly rather than adjudicated.

When mediation applies, and who actually runs it

Where the Board forms the opinion that a complaint may be resolved by mediation, it can direct the parties concerned to attempt that resolution — through a mediator the parties mutually agree on, or through an existing mediation mechanism already provided for under Indian law. Two things follow from that wording. First, this is the Board's judgment call, not something either party can demand or block on its own initiative. Second, the Board doesn't conduct the mediation itself; it hands the dispute off to a mediator, and the parties themselves have a say in who that is.

What Section 31 doesn't specify

The text is deliberately short. It doesn't set a timeline for mediation to conclude, doesn't say what happens procedurally if mediation fails, and doesn't limit which kinds of complaints qualify beyond the Board's own opinion that mediation is capable of resolving them. That leaves the Board wide discretion over when to use this route at all — and no promise to a complainant or respondent that mediation is available in their particular case just because they'd prefer it to a full inquiry.

Why this matters in practice

Mediation under Section 31 is discretionary and case-by-case — not a mandatory step every complaint has to pass through before the Board can open an inquiry under Section 28. In practice, it gives the Board a lower-friction way to close out disputes that look more like a contractual or relationship disagreement between two parties than a willful violation calling for a formal finding and a penalty. The Penalties & Enforcement FAQs cover this same ground in more detail.

Illustration: a Data Fiduciary and a Consent Manager it works with disagree over how a specific data-sharing instruction should have been carried out, and a Data Principal complains about the resulting confusion. If the Board's view is that this is really a dispute about the parties' own arrangement rather than a deliberate breach, it can direct them to mediation under Section 31 instead of opening a full 28(5) inquiry — leaving the inquiry route open if mediation doesn't resolve things.

How Section 31 connects to the rest of the Act

Section 31 sits between Section 28's inquiry procedure and Section 33's penalty regime — it's a way of resolving a complaint before, or instead of, that machinery running its full course. It's distinct from Section 32's voluntary undertaking: mediation resolves a dispute between the parties involved, while a voluntary undertaking is a commitment the person facing scrutiny offers directly to the Board, without another party's involvement at all.