IAMAI names Mihir Rale chair of Legal Tech Committee

MUMBAI: Regulation in India’s digital economy has a habit of arriving in layers, one atop another, until businesses can barely see the ground beneath them. The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) reckons the fix is not silence but sharper argument, and it has just handed the job to two people paid to argue for a living.

Mihir Rale, partner at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, takes over as chair of IAMAI’s Legal Tech Committee. Dibyajyoti Das, head of legal and compliance at Experian India, is co-chair. Between them sits a fair chunk of India’s corporate legal establishment, one from a law firm that shapes deals, the other from a company that lives and dies by data compliance.

The committee itself is not new bureaucracy dressed up as innovation. It is IAMAI’s standing bench of legal expertise, pulling together general counsels, law firms and legal tech providers under one roof, with a brief to talk to each other rather than past each other. That matters more than it sounds. India’s digital economy now cuts across telecoms, fintech, e-commerce, health tech and artificial intelligence all at once, and each of those sectors has historically written its own rulebook, often without checking what the neighbours were doing.

Rale’s opening pitch is a useful tell for where this committee wants to go. He is not asking for a lighter regulatory touch so much as a more coherent one, a framework that “fuels innovation, protects consumers and addresses genuine risk” without piling on requirements that overlap or contradict each other. That is a careful line to walk. Ask industry bodies what they want and the answer is usually less regulation. IAMAI’s version is subtler: not fewer rules necessarily, but rules that actually talk to each other.

There is a structural role too. The committee will act as an internal legal resource for IAMAI’s other sectoral committees, stepping in wherever a regulatory or legal question needs proper scrutiny rather than a guess. In an economy where a fintech ruling can quietly reshape how an e-commerce platform handles data, that kind of cross-checking is overdue.

Whether this translates into anything Delhi’s policymakers actually listen to remains the open question. Industry committees are good at identifying friction. They are less reliably good at getting anyone in government to remove it. But with a Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas partner and an Experian India compliance chief now formally in the room, IAMAI has at least given itself a stronger hand to make the case.