Privacy Policy

Last updated: 8 October 2026

This Privacy Policy explains what personal data Mancho collects, why we use it, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and the rights you have. It should be read with our Terms of Service.

Who we are

Mancho is an online marketplace at mancho.in. It connects people and businesses ("Clients") with performers and creative professionals ("Talent") and with teachers and mentors, for bookings, gigs, contracts, paid 1:1 teaching sessions and courses. Talent can also form collectives (groups of performers) to apply for gigs as a team.

• Who is responsible for your data: Mancho, Bawana Rd, Delhi Technological University, Shahbad Daulatpur Village, Rohini, Delhi 110042.
• Website: mancho.in
• We are an intermediary and a facilitator. We help Clients and Talent find each other, communicate, agree terms and, for online payments, collect and settle money through a licensed payment partner. We do not ourselves perform the booked service, teach the session or, for cash bookings, handle the cash.

We follow the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and the rules made under it.

The short version

• You can browse some parts of Mancho without an account. To book, be booked, teach, be paid or message, you need an account.
• We collect what you give us (your name, contact details and profile, and, if you are a Client or you want to be paid, your PAN or GSTIN and payout details) and what Mancho records as you use it (bookings, messages, reviews and payments).
• We ask for your consent to use your personal data for the purposes below. Where the law requires us to keep certain records, we keep them for that reason.
• We use trusted service providers, such as our payment partner, to run Mancho.
• Location: you choose the town or city we use to show what is near you. Mancho never receives your exact position. If you are a Talent, the town or city where you are based is public.
• If you create or join a collective, you decide whether it shows on your public profile. The lead of a collective can include you in team applications. Every member can read the Collective chat.
• If you teach as a Mentor, your full name and profile photo are shown to people who are signed in to Mancho, and you can pause your teaching profile at any time.
• We keep most of your registration details for 180 days after you close your account, and payment and tax records for longer where Indian law requires it. See How long we keep your data.
• You have rights over your data: access, correction, erasure, nomination and complaint. See Your rights.
• Children under 18: Mancho is for adults. We do not currently accept sign-ups from anyone under 18. We do not track children, show them targeted ads, or show their activity status. See Children under 18.
• For help, or a complaint about your personal data, write to support@mancho.in. See Contact and complaints.

What we collect

We collect only what we need to run the marketplace.

Why we ask for your date of birth. We ask your date of birth when you sign up, to check that you are 18 or over. If your account was created before we started asking, we ask you once, the next time you sign in. The law allows us to process data to confirm that someone is not a child. Once you have given it, only our support team can change it, for a good reason, and we may ask for proof. When you delete your account, we destroy your date of birth at once and keep only whether you were 18 or over.

Aadhaar. We do not ask for Aadhaar for identity or duplicate-account checks, and we do not link accounts using an Aadhaar number.

How we store PAN and GSTIN. While your account is active, we store your PAN or GSTIN in encrypted form. This protects it, but it can still be recovered by someone holding the key, so it is not made permanently unreadable. We also create a one-way code from it, which cannot be turned back into your number. For Clients, we use that code only to stop the same document being used to open more than one account, or to apply again after an application was refused. For Talent and Mentors, we use it only to make sure our team's check applies to the exact PAN you gave us: if the number changes, we check it again. We show you only the last four characters.

Location: what we collect and what we do not

• Your saved location. If you choose "Use my location", your device finds your nearest town or city on our list. Mancho never receives your device's exact location. We save only the town or city, whether you picked it or your device found it, and the date. We do not store an exact position for anyone.
• Who can see it. You, and Mancho team members who help with support and safety. Other users never see it. Companies that help us run Mancho, such as our hosting and search providers, handle it for us.
• If you are a Talent. The town or city where you are based is public. It is on your public profile and in search results. Anyone can open your public profile, including people who are not signed in, and search engines may list it and keep an old copy for a while after you change it. We do not ask a Talent for a pincode for their profile. We also use your base town or city to show you nearby gigs first.
• If you are a Mentor who teaches in person. The town or city where you teach is shown on your teaching profile to people who are signed in to Mancho.
• Gigs and bookings. The town or city of a gig is shown to Talent, together with any venue address you add. When you request an in-person booking, we share the venue's town or city with the Talent you are booking straight away. We share the street address and pincode with that Talent only once the booking is confirmed. We do not collect map coordinates for any of these.
• How we measure distance. Distances are measured between the centres of towns and cities and are rounded. Only the person who is looking sees a distance, never the Talent, Mentor or Client on the other side.
• What we do not do. We do not use your location for advertising, we do not sell it, and we do not track your movements.
• Place data. Town and city names and locations come from GeoNames (opens in a new tab), used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. We changed the data. The full credit is on our About page.

Why we use your data

We use your personal data on the basis of your consent, which you give when you accept this Policy at sign-up and at the specific points where we ask for sensitive details such as PAN or GSTIN. Where a law requires us to keep or use certain records, we do so to comply with the law.

We use your data only for these purposes. If we ever want to use it for a materially new purpose, we will tell you and ask for fresh consent where the law requires it.

Cash bookings and your wallet

Because Mancho allows cash bookings that must be logged in the app, we want to be clear about the data this involves.

• When a cash booking is logged, we record the booking, the cash amount (which is the agreed booking price on Mancho, not a number typed in freely) and the commission the Talent owes us on it.
• We run a wallet for Talent that tracks earnings, top-ups and commission owed. It can show a negative balance when commission owed is more than the earnings credited. We use this data to run the wallet, apply commission owed against future earnings, and manage top-ups paid through our payment partner.
• The Client and the Talent each confirm a cash payment before a booking is treated as completed. We store these confirmations and their times (in Indian Standard Time).
• We run fraud-prevention checks on cancellations and cash confirmations. If a cancellation is disputed, or a cash confirmation is contested, a member of our team reviews it, and we keep the evidence of that review. No automated score alone leads to a penalty, and you can appeal before any lasting consequence takes effect.
• We may restrict an account for cause, based on logged transactions or a confirmed fraud finding after appeal. If we do, we keep the record of that decision and its evidence for as long as we legitimately need it, and we correct or erase it if the decision is overturned on appeal.

We do not sell this data, and we do not use debt-collection agencies to recover money you may owe us.

Who we share your data with

We do not sell your personal data. We share it only as needed to run Mancho.

• Other users, as the service needs. For example, a Client you book with sees what they need to work with you, and you see what you need about them. The public parts of your profile, including your cover photo, can be seen by people browsing. A Talent's public profile can be opened by anyone without an account and can be found through search engines. A Mentor's teaching profile can be opened only by people who are signed in to Mancho.
• Collectives. The lead and members of a collective can see its member list. If the lead applies for a gig or open call as a team, the client who reviews it can see the members' public profiles and the collective's name. If you choose to show a collective, anyone can see its name on your public profile, including people who do not have a Mancho account.
• Collective chat. Messages in a Collective chat can be read by all current members, including messages sent before a member joined. If you leave a collective, your messages stay in the chat as "Former member". Members can see who reacted to a message, and with which emoji. Members who have the chat open may see, live, when you are typing. Typing is never saved. Mancho moderators see a message, and a few around it, only if someone reports it.
• Activity status. If you turn on activity status, people you already chat with in Messages can see when you are active on Mancho, or when you were last active in the past 24 hours. If you turn it off, your status is no longer shown and the data is erased. Activity status is never shown for a user known to be under 18.
• Mentor profiles. If you teach on Mancho, your full name and profile photo are shown to people who are signed in to Mancho, on your teaching profile and in mentor search. People can also search for you by name. We never show your email, phone number or PAN there. If you pause your teaching profile, we stop showing them. People who already booked a session with you can still see your name for that session.
• Copies outside Mancho. Search engines and other websites may keep an older copy of a public profile for a while after you change it. We cannot control those copies.
• Service providers who handle data for us, on our instructions and under contract:

• Government, regulators, law enforcement and courts, where the law requires us to share data, to establish, exercise or defend legal claims, or to report unlawful content, including suspected child sexual abuse material, which we must report.
• Professional advisers, such as auditors and lawyers, who must keep it confidential.
• A new owner, if Mancho is involved in a merger, acquisition or reorganisation. This Policy will continue to apply to your data.

Data stored outside India

Some of our service providers may store or process your data on servers outside India. Where they do, we work only with providers bound by contract to protect your data, and we follow Indian law on transfers outside India.

How long we keep your data

We keep personal data only as long as we need it for the purposes above, or as long as the law requires. When you delete your account:

• Straight away: you lose access to your account; your password and date of birth are destroyed (we keep only whether you were 18 or over); your saved location is deleted; and your profile, contact details, cover photo, uploaded documents and anything you have posted are removed from public view. Removed from public view is not the same as fully erased from our systems. The points below explain what we keep and for how long.
• For 180 days: Indian law requires us to keep your registration and contact details (such as your name, email address, phone number and profile photo) for 180 days after you close your account, in case they are needed for a lawful investigation. We then erase them automatically. You do not need to ask again. If a court or an authorised government agency asks us to keep a person's information, we keep it, including files they uploaded, until we are told we no longer need to, and then erase it.
• For longer, where the law requires it: payment, invoice and tax records, and the record of any dispute, are kept for the period Indian tax and accounting law requires, and then destroyed. We cannot delete these earlier, even if you ask.
• If we find child sexual abuse material: we keep that material and, so the authorities can investigate, the other files uploaded from the same account. We do not delete them when the account is closed or deleted, and we do not show them to anyone. We keep them until the authorities no longer need them. We review this from time to time.
• Records of changes to platform settings (who changed a setting, when and why) are kept for at least 3 years as an internal audit record.
• A duplicate-check code for Clients, kept indefinitely: we keep the one-way code made from a Client's PAN or GSTIN, and a count of verification attempts, with no name, email, phone number or account link attached. This stops a document that has already been refused from being used again through a new account. Because it identifies the document and not you, it is not a record of you. A Talent's or Mentor's PAN, its code and its last four characters are not kept. They are erased when the account is deleted, except where we must keep evidence for a report to the authorities.
• What other people still see: bookings, contracts and briefs you completed stay available to the person on the other side, with your details replaced by a neutral placeholder, so their own records stay complete. Anything the other person wrote or sent as part of that work remains theirs and is not deleted. For in-person bookings you requested, the street address and pincode are removed after 180 days. The town or city stays on the booking.
• Location and venue details: turning location off deletes your saved location straight away. Deleting your account also deletes your saved location straight away, deletes a Talent's base town or city and a Mentor's teaching town or city from the profile, and removes them from our search, except where we must keep evidence for a report to the authorities. Search engines may keep an old copy of a public profile for a while, which we cannot control. Your device's location is never kept, because Mancho never receives it.
• Backups: deleted data may stay in our backups until they are overwritten in the normal backup cycle. We use backups only to recover from a failure, and we do not bring deleted data back into use.
• Activity status: we keep only the latest value. It is erased when you turn it off, after 24 hours without activity (within 1 hour of that 24-hour mark), when you sign out everywhere, and when you delete your account.
• Collective chat messages: when your account is closed or banned, your messages show as "Former member" at once and their text is hidden at once. The sealed original is destroyed on day 180, unless we must keep it longer because of an open report, an open dispute or a legal request. A message removed after an upheld report is kept sealed for 180 days, then destroyed. A dissolved collective's Collective chat is readable for 12 months and is deleted the day after that, unless an open report, an open dispute or a legal request means we must keep it longer. If a message is reported, the copy our team reviews (the message and a few around it) is kept for 180 days after we decide the report, then deleted.
• Reactions: a reaction stays until you remove it. If you leave a collective, your reactions stay and show as "Former member". If your account is closed, your reactions are deleted at the same moment your messages are hidden. If a message is removed, its reactions go with it.
• Typing: never stored.
• Photos and videos you upload: a cover photo, portfolio item, photo or video that you replace or remove is hidden from everyone at once and then deleted from storage. When you delete your account, your uploads are removed from public view straight away and then deleted. We keep a file longer only if we must: for example, if it is the subject of a report we have not yet decided, if we removed it for breaking our Community Rules (see below), or if a court or an authorised agency has asked us to keep it. Your profile photo is treated as part of your registration details (see the 180-day point above).
• Content we remove: if we remove something you uploaded because it broke our Community Rules or because the law required it, we keep a sealed copy, and the record of the report and our decision, for 180 days from the removal, then destroy them. Nobody can see the sealed copy. We keep it longer if a court or an authorised agency asks us to.
• Reports: if you report something, or something of yours is reported, we keep the report (who reported, what, why, and what we decided) for 180 days after we decide it, then delete it. We do not tell the person reported who made the report. We keep it longer only if a court or an authorised agency asks us to, or a complaint about the decision is still open.
• Collectives: if you leave a collective, or your account is closed, you stop being a member and your choice to show that collective is deleted. Records that you were a member (a code that stands for you, your role and the dates) may stay in the collective's history until they are erased with your other account data.
• Pausing a teaching profile: pausing stops us showing your name, photo and teaching profile. It does not delete them. They stay on your account until you delete it. People who already booked a session with you can still see your name for that session.
• Money you owe and fraud findings: if you have a negative wallet balance or an unresolved fraud finding when you leave, we may keep the related records for as long as we need them to pursue or defend that claim, up to the time limit under Indian law (generally three years for a simple debt), and no longer. A fraud finding that is overturned on appeal is corrected or erased.

Pause, deactivate and delete. Pausing a teaching profile only hides that profile, and you can undo it yourself. Deactivating hides your account until our support team reactivates it. Deleting ends your access for good and starts the time periods above.

Your rights

Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, you have the right to:

• Access: get a summary of the personal data we hold about you and how we use it.
• Correction and erasure: ask us to correct data that is wrong, or erase data we no longer need for a lawful purpose. We will erase it, except data the law requires us to keep (for example, tax records) or data we need to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim (for example, money owed or an unresolved fraud matter). We will tell you when an exception applies and why.
• Make a complaint: complain to our Grievance Officer and get a response within the times in Contact and complaints.
• Nominate: name another person to use your rights if you die or cannot act for yourself.
• Withdraw consent: withdraw your consent at any time for anything we do on the basis of consent. This does not affect what we have already done, and some services may no longer work without the data. Ways to withdraw:
  • Activity status: turn it off in Settings. This erases your activity data.
  • Location: turn it off in Settings. This deletes your saved location.
  • Collective on your profile: open the collective and switch it off.
  • Collective chat: leave the collective. Your past messages stay with the collective as "Former member", as you were told before you joined. To have them hidden, close your account.
  • Teaching profile: pause your teaching profile in the app. This stops us showing your name, photo and profile.
• If the user is a child: the parent or lawful guardian uses these rights for the child. See Children under 18.

You can do several of these yourself in the app: edit your profile, manage your saved location, show or hide a collective on your profile, pause your teaching profile, deactivate your account, or delete it. For anything else, contact our Grievance Officer.

Appeals about restrictions and fraud findings. If your account is restricted, or a fraud finding is made against you, you can appeal. On request or on appeal, we will give you the substance of the decision and the conduct or bookings it is based on, with other people's personal information removed. A different reviewer will look at the matter again, and the outcome can be reversed: if your appeal succeeds, the restriction is lifted and the finding is corrected or erased. This appeal is our internal complaint process. It does not remove any right you have to approach the Data Protection Board of India, a consumer commission or another authority.

Children under 18

Mancho is for adults. Under Indian data-protection law, anyone under 18 is a child. You must be 18 or older to use Mancho, and we do not currently accept sign-ups from anyone under 18. We ask your date of birth to check this (see What we collect). See also Who can use Mancho.

If we learn that a user is under 18. We restrict the account at once, so it can no longer be used. If the date of birth was entered wrongly, write to support@mancho.in within 30 days to correct it; we may ask for proof. If it is not corrected within 30 days, we delete the account and its data, except anything the law requires us to keep, as set out in How long we keep your data.

What we never do with a child's data. We do not track children, monitor their behaviour or show them targeted advertising. We never show the activity status or typing of a user known to be under 18, and never show such a user anyone else's.

Parents and guardians. If you are a parent or lawful guardian and believe your child has a Mancho account, write to support@mancho.in. For a child, the parent or guardian uses the child's rights set out in Your rights.

Security

• How we protect your data. We use technical and organisational measures suited to the data. These include encrypted storage of sensitive identifiers such as PAN and GSTIN (we show back only the last four characters), access controls on our team's tools, and secure payment handling through our payment partner.
• If there is a data breach. If a personal data breach happens, we will tell the Data Protection Board of India and the people affected, as the law requires.
• Checking content. Cover photos and other content you upload may be checked by automated tools before they are shown publicly. We keep a record of these checks to enforce our Community Rules and to comply with the law.

Cookies

Mancho uses only essential cookies and local storage: to keep you signed in, to protect your account and our forms from misuse, and to remember settings on your device. We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not currently use third-party analytics tools. We count how often a Talent's portfolio is viewed and contacted, and show those totals only to that Talent.

Contact and complaints

Support. For help with a booking, a session or a payment, write to support@mancho.in. We aim to reply within 2 working days.

Grievance Officer. If you have a question or complaint about your personal data, or about content on Mancho, write to our Grievance Officer. It helps if you write "Grievance" in the subject line.

Grievance Officer

• Name: Ritik Vasisth
• Email: support@mancho.in
• Address: Bawana Rd, Delhi Technological University, Shahbad Daulatpur Village, Rohini, Delhi 110042

Within 24 hours, we'll confirm we have your complaint, send you a copy of it as we recorded it, and give you a reference number to follow it up. We'll give you our decision within 7 days.

If you are not satisfied. For a complaint about content or about your account, if you are not satisfied with the Grievance Officer's decision, you can appeal to the Grievance Appellate Committee set up by the Government of India, within 30 days of the decision, at gac.gov.in. For a data protection matter, after using our complaint process, you can complain to the Data Protection Board of India. For a consumer matter, you can approach the appropriate consumer commission. Your rights under the law cannot be signed away.

Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make a material change, we will tell you by email or by a notice in the app and, where the law requires it, ask for your consent again. The "Last updated" date at the top always shows the current version. If you keep using Mancho after we tell you about a change, you accept it, except where the law requires your express consent to the change.