Section 35 — Protection of Action Taken in Good Faith

Section 35 bars any suit, prosecution or other legal proceeding against the Central Government, the Board, its Chairperson, or any Member, officer or employee of the Board, for anything done or intended to be done in good faith under the Act or its rules. It's an immunity clause aimed squarely at the institutions administering the Act — not at Data Fiduciaries, Data Processors, or anyone else the Act regulates.

What "good faith" is doing here

Clauses like this appear across a wide range of Indian statutes, and the pattern in how courts have generally construed the good-faith qualifier is narrow, not broad: it protects an honest, reasonably-taken decision made within the powers the Act actually grants — not a decision taken carelessly, outside the scope of that power, or in bad faith. There's no DPDP-specific case law yet to confirm exactly how a court would test the Board's conduct against this standard, but the general shape of the protection is that it shields good-faith regulators from being personally dragged into litigation for doing their job, not that it makes every Board decision immune from challenge regardless of how it was reached.

Why this matters in practice

For an organisation navigating a Board inquiry, Section 35 mostly explains why you can't sue an individual Board Member or officer personally over how they handled your case — your recourse against a Board decision runs through the Act's own appeal mechanism, to the Appellate Tribunal, rather than through a separate suit against the people who made the decision. It also has no bearing on your own liability: nothing in Section 35 gives a Data Fiduciary or Processor any equivalent "we acted in good faith" defence against a penalty under Section 33 — that immunity simply isn't written for your side of the relationship.

How Section 35 connects to the rest of the Act

Sections 27 and 28 set out the Board's powers and the inquiry process this immunity is meant to let it exercise without personal legal exposure to its own officers. Section 29 is where an organisation actually challenges a Board decision it disagrees with — through appeal to the Appellate Tribunal, not through a separate proceeding against the Board's people under Section 35's cover.