Indian company law imposes liability on directors and key managerial personnel through at least four distinct doctrinal routes, each resting on a different theory of culpability and each triggered by a different statute. The Companies Act, 2013 attaches civil and quasi-criminal consequences to the “officer who is in default”, a status that can arise from formal designation almost independently of actual involvement in wrongdoing. The general criminal law, following the Supreme Court’s decisions in Iridium India Telecom Ltd. v. Motorola Inc. and Sunil Bharti Mittal v. CBI, instead requires proof of personal mens rea or an express statutory fiction before a director may be arraigned alongside the company. The Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881 imposes a distinct form of statutory vicarious liability on persons who were “in charge of and responsible for” the conduct of business at the material time, while the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 fastens personal liability on directors who continued trading with knowledge that insolvency could not reasonably be avoided. This paper argues that the coexistence of these four models, rather than reflecting a considered legislative theory of managerial responsibility, has produced a fragmented and forum-dependent liability regime in which the same director, on materially identical facts, may face entirely different thresholds of culpability depending on which regulator or complainant elects to proceed and under which statute. The paper further argues that the statutory safe harbour available to independent directors under Section 149(12) of the Companies Act, 2013, though textually precise, is being narrowed in regulatory and tribunal practice through an expansive treatment of constructive knowledge that risks converting board membership itself into evidence of complicity. Drawing on the doctrinal architecture developed across the Companies Act, the Negotiable Instruments Act, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, and the general criminal law, the paper proposes a functional and graduated standard of liability keyed to a person’s actual proximity to the impugned decision rather than to formal designation and recommends statutory and procedural reforms to bring India’s fragmented liability regime closer to a coherent theory of corporate governance responsibility.