New, Free Access to Indian Parliamentary Debates, on Indian Kanoon

Full text of debates of the Lok Sabha — the lower house of the Parliament of India — from 1998 to present, are now available free of charge on Indian Kanoon, Dr. Sushant Sinha‘s free access to law service for India.

Lok Sabha debates on Indian Kanoon can be retrieved along with the texts of statutes and case law in multi-database searches, or can be searched in a stand-alone database.

In the text of Lok Sabha debates on Indian Kanoon, the name of each member of Parliament who speaks is hyperlinked, to enable quick retrieval of all statements by that member.

Dr. Sinha says that the debates database includes all Lok Sabha debates from 1998 to present that the Indian Parliament has made available, and that older debates will be added if the Parliament makes them available.

The debates have been added as part of a partnership between Indian Kanoon and PRS Legislative Research, which provides legislative history and research services to India’s national and state legislatures. PRS will use these debates to enhance its legislative information services offered to members of Parliament. In addition, members of Parliament and their staffs can search Lok Sabha debates directly on Indian Kanoon.

This provision of Lok Sabha debates on Indian Kanoon thus furnishes an example of how government employees use of free access to law services to obtain enhanced access to legal information, and thus potentially to improve the efficiency of government operations and services to citizens. Access to Lok Sabha debates on Indian Kanoon accordingly demonstrates how free access to law services can function as “extensions” of e-Government systems arising in the public sphere, as described by Robinson et al. in their important article, Government Data and the Invisible Hand.

Indian Kanoon now offers free access to more than 20 databases of Indian legal materials.

Today Dr. Sinha announced planned enhancements to Indian Kanoon, including “[c]ase summaries,” auto-completion of search queries, and improved relevancy of search results.

For more information on Indian Kanoon, click here for my extended interview with Dr. Sinha on Slaw.ca, the Canadian legal blog.

New on Slaw.ca: Indian Kanoon: Sushant Sinha on Innovation and Free Law in India

Dr. Sushant Sinha‘s free access to law service for India, Indian Kanoon, is the subject of my new, in-depth article on Slaw.ca, the Canadian legal blog.

The article provides a great deal of detailed information about Indian Kanoon, including information on technology and open source, users and usage, business models and sustainability, partnerships, product differentiation, advertising, Indian Kanoon‘s online forums, and Dr. Sinha’s innovative concept of “the thirst for law”: the idea, first expressed in Dr. Sinha’s recent VoxPopuLII post, that free access to law online stimulates the public’s demand for such access, in a virtuous circle.

The post also describes Indian Kanoon‘s new partnership with PRS Legislative Research, in which Indian Kanoon is adding to its content full text of the debates of the Parliament of India, which PRS will then use in providing legislative history and research services to members of India’s national and state parliaments. This partnership exemplifies how civil-society-based free-access-to-law services can function as “extensions” of e-Government, consistent with the vision set out by Robinson et al., in Government Data and the Invisible Hand.

I’m very grateful to Dr. Sinha for taking time for extensive interviews that provided the content of the article.

Iyengar on Free Access to Law in India

Prashant Iyengar of Alternative Law Forum and the Center for Internet and Society, has posted the abstract of his 2010 report on free access to law in India, entitled Free Access to Law: Is It Here to Stay? India, Country Report (July 2010), on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Sometime in early 2008, Sushant Sinha, an Indian computer science doctoral candidate from Michigan University began offering free access to decisions of the Indian Supreme Court via his website IndianKanoon.org (IK) . In the ensuing two years, IK has grown exponentially and has become one of the most popular websites for accessing Indian legal materials, hosting over 1.2 million documents at the time of this writing. This paper is styled as a ‘case study’ that probes the IndianKanoon story – its genesis, successes and impacts – in some detail. This is also a paper that interrogates the conditions that make a site like IndianKanoon possible. It seeks an answer to the question: Viewed from what frame do the actions of one man unilaterally deciding to host over a million legal documents online for free become sensible?

For the full text of the report, please contact Mr. Iyengar.

Dr. Sinha recently described his system, Indian Kanoon, in a post at VoxPopuLII.

Mr. Iyengar recently wrote about free access to law in India, and about his free law system, OpenJudis, in a post at VoxPopuLII.

New on VoxPopuLII: Sinha on Indian Kanoon: The Genesis and the Legal Thirst

Dr. Sushant Sinha of Yahoo! India has posted Indian Kanoon: The Genesis and the Legal Thirst, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Dr. Sinha describes the origins and development of Indian Kanoon, the free legal search engine for India, for which Dr. Sinha was recently named one of “18 Young Innovators under 35 in India” by MIT’s Technology Review India.

Indian Kanoon provides free online access to Indian statutes, judicial and administrative decisions, debates of India’s constituent assemblies, reports of the Indian Law Commission, and articles from selected law journals. Indian Kanoon also hosts several discussion forums, in which users can ask and receive responses to questions concerning substantive legal issues or Indian Kanoon‘s functionality.

In his post, Dr. Sinha identifies as the principal goal of Indian Kanoon the “empower[ment of] citizens” by enabling them to become informed about “their rights and privileges” under the law.

Dr. Sinha observes that the number of visitors to Indian Kanoon is extremely large and steadily rising; and that the average visitor to Indian Kanoon spends substantial time viewing each retrieved document. Dr. Sinha concludes that these data indicate a growing demand among the Indian people for access to the law — a demand he calls The Legal Thirst — and considers possible causes for this increasing demand.

Dr. Sinha suggests that two factors in particular — the provision of access to law free of charge, and improvements in search technology, including “forgiving” keyword search functionality and the ranking of results by relevance — are fueling the desire of the Indian public to read the full text of the laws that govern them.

Dr. Sinha’s post will be of interest to legal information systems developers, legal publishers, the ICT for development community, and all those interested in the free access to law movement.

IndianKanoon Founder Honored as a Top Innovator by MIT Technology Review

Dr. Sushant Sinha, creator of the free access to law service IndianKanoon, has been honored as one of India’s 18 top innovators, by MIT’s Technology Review, according to a post at rediff.com.

Click here, then click to slide number 18, to see the article.

The article states:

[Indian Kanoon] has been designed to provide the most relevant Indian laws and court judgments in response to a query. It enables people to quickly determine the standing law of the land on any issue and empowers them to seek justice.

The website has gained quick attention and is used by roughly half a million unique visitors and has more than two million page views every month.

With dual degree in computer science and engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and PhD in the same discipline from University of Michigan, Sinha felt the need to generate awareness of laws among the citizens of India. In May 2007, he started developing the portal and finally launched it on 4 January 2008.

“Even when laws empower citizens in a large number of ways, a significant fraction of the population is completely ignorant of their rights and privileges. As a result, common people are afraid of going to the police and rarely go to court to seek justice. People continue to live under the fear of unknown laws and a corrupt police. I started the project as a way to enrich court judgments by linking them with laws and other references. The linking turned out to be so useful that I started building a search engine for Indian law. Indian Kanoon makes it simpler for people to access information on any law or judgment,” explains Sinha. [...]

Presently the Indian Kanoon hosts over 1.2 million documents. It is integrated with the Supreme Court of India, 22 High Courts, and 17 Tribunals to provide a real-time fresh judgments to the users. Sinha is now working on integrating the online channel further with all state laws and with different rules formed by government agencies. [...]

For more information, please see the article.