Employee NDA Template for Indian Employers

Because the usual non-disclosure agreement for employees is two agreements stapled together, and Indian law treats them in opposite ways. One restrains information. The other restrains a person.

A confidentiality clause is an ordinary contract: free consent, lawful object, enforceable. A clause that stops the employee working for a rival after leaving is void to that extent under section 27 of the Contract Act, and the section carries no test of reasonableness in its operative words, so one city and six months does not save it. The employment agreement pack sets out that argument in full; this one builds the clauses that survive it.

Then there is the work itself. Copyright in a work made in the course of employment vests in the employer by default, but an assignment that names no term runs five years and stops at the border, and a patent has no employer default at all. A consultant sits outside the copyright default entirely. The pack's IP annexure fixes each of these in writing and names the work, which is easier when the job description for the role already says what the work is.

And the breach. A sum named in the NDA is a ceiling on reasonable compensation, not a debt, and it cannot be deducted from wages, which the Code on Wages lists exhaustively. What you can do is claim the actual loss, ask a court to restrain the disclosure, treat it as misconduct where your standing orders say so, and, where the leak is personal data, point to the IT Act penalty for disclosure in breach of a lawful contract. The NDA for employees in India is the lawful contract that penalty needs.

The same pack serves a plant guarding its process sheets, a startup guarding its source code, a hospital guarding patient records and a sales office guarding its price list: the schedule changes, the clauses do not.