endomorphosis/ipfs_india_state_laws

India state acts: India Code PDFs recovered from Common Crawl (pilot)

Research snapshot of state and union-territory acts published on India Code (Legislative Department, Ministry of Law and Justice; state material uploaded by the respective State Governments and UT Administrations). Recovered from Common Crawl archive copies only.

Not legal advice. The official gazette and India Code prevail over this corpus. This is a PILOT (about 150 archive pulls); it is not complete coverage.

Field	Value
Snapshot date	2026-10-26
Source	India Code bitstream PDFs, as captured by Common Crawl (crawls 2025-07 to 2026-10)
Laws / instruments	138
Rows (articles.parquet)	5764 (text 5757, repealed_placeholder 7)
Known gaps	555 (see manifests/known_gaps.json)

Jurisdiction (filename-based)	Acts
IN-ASSAM	6
IN-BENGAL	3
IN-BIHAR	4
IN-BOMBAY	6
IN-CHHATTISGARH	7
IN-DELHI	7
IN-GOA	7
IN-GUJARAT	5
IN-HARYANA	7
IN-HIMACHAL	7
IN-JAMMU	2
IN-JHARKHAND	4
IN-KERALA	2
IN-MADHYA_PRADESH	2
IN-MAHARASHTRA	7
IN-MANIPUR	4
IN-MEGHALAYA	7
IN-MIZORAM	2
IN-NAGALAND	7
IN-ODISHA	2
IN-ORISSA	5
IN-PUDUCHERRY	7
IN-PUNJAB	7
IN-RAJASTHAN	7
IN-SIKKIM	1
IN-TAMIL_NADU	7
IN-TRIPURA	6

Rows

• laws.text is the pdftotext (layout mode) text layer of the archived PDF, with trailing spaces and blank-line runs normalised and PII redacted. No OCR was run.
• Each articles row is a verbatim, in-order exact substring of its law text: an optional preamble, then each numbered section. Arrangement-of-sections (contents) entries are not rows. Heading-only rows are dropped and listed in known_gaps. body_status is text or repealed_placeholder.
• laws.metadata_json carries per-law provenance: archive URL, WARC filename, offset, length, capture timestamp, WARC-Record-ID, sha256 of the WARC record and of the PDF, and text_layer_quality (born_digital_or_clean or embedded_ocr_layer_noisy: some India Code PDFs carry an older embedded OCR layer, kept verbatim with its errors).
• The state/UT tier is inferred from the PDF filename naming a state/UT; it was not checked against the India Code collection page for every item.

Robots and provenance

• Robots evidence: Wayback capture 20260502020449 of www.indiacode.nic.in/robots.txt (DSpace default; only /discover and /simple-search are disallowed; /handle and /bitstream allowed). Search pages were not used.
• All bytes came from data.commoncrawl.org range requests under the shared fleet pacing lock (2 s after the previous request end), honest user agent, fleet light gates. indiacode.nic.in was never contacted (it returns Akamai 403 since 2026-09; that block was not bypassed).
• Records that Common Crawl truncated at 1 MiB were skipped.
• Acts already present in endomorphosis/ipfs_india_laws@829e377049c8befbf63cc7500714786487437d9d (matched by normalised title) were excluded.

Licence and source terms

Proprietary notice on the source. India Code carries this footer disclaimer (verbatim; archived handle page https://www.indiacode.nic.in/handle/123456789/16821 as captured by Common Crawl CC-MAIN-2026-34 on 2026-08-11 12:05:22 UTC, record in https://data.commoncrawl.org/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2026-34/segments/1786091385416.52/warc/CC-MAIN-20260811102717-20260811132717-00308.warc.gz): "Updation and uploading of all Acts enacted; Rules, Regulations, Notifications, etc., issued, by States/Union territories available on this web page is the proprietary of respective State Governments and Union territory Administrations."

So the state governments and UT administrations carry a proprietary notice over this material. No open licence and no reuse terms were found in the archived copies read.

Inclusion basis. These texts are included because of the project owner's decision (2026-10-26) to collect government works and government data about the court system. As context only: Copyright Act 1957 s.52(1)(q)(i) exempts Official Gazette matter except an Act of a Legislature, and s.52(1)(q)(ii) covers an Act of a Legislature only when published together with commentary or other original matter. Neither clause is claimed as a licence for this corpus.

No open licence is claimed for this dataset. Rights holders can request removal through the takedown route below. Details in manifests/terms.json.

Takedown and contact

To report an error, request a correction, or ask for removal of any record, open a discussion on this dataset's Hugging Face page (Community tab). The dataset owner, endomorphosis, reviews these. Please do not post personal data in the discussion.

Pacing disclosure

• Requests 1 to 28 were made before the shared fleet lock existed and were self-paced at 2.26 s or more start to start. Their logged end-to-next-start gap is about 0 s, because t_end was logged after the pacing wait.
• Requests 29 to 150 used the shared lock. Their logged gaps of 1.998 to 2.01 s against the logged t_end are a logging-order artefact: fetch_cc.py (v1) writes cc_pace.last_end and releases the lock before it reads the clock for the logged t_end, so the real gap after the lock end time is 2 s or more.
• scrapers/fetch_cc_v2.py fixes the log order (t_end is recorded before last_end is written and the lock is released). fetch_cc.py is kept unchanged as the version that fetched this batch. This pack was not yet published when the fix was made, so it was applied in place before first release.

Known limitations

• 8 rows (sections) still carry contents-page style text such as dot leaders and page numbers, where the contents layout ran into the body; the rows remain verbatim substrings of the law text.
• source_url and metadata_json.original_url have tracking query parameters (utm_*, ref) removed; archive URLs, WARC offsets, lengths and record sha256s are unchanged.

Notes on status, gaps, schema and terms

• laws.law_status is in_force_per_source_flag_unverified: India Code lists these acts, and this corpus has not independently checked whether each act or section is still in force or amended.
• Scanned PDFs without a usable text layer, and PDFs with garbled legacy-font text layers, were not OCR'd; they are listed in manifests/known_gaps.json as deferred.
• articles.body_status is a column added beyond the Malta/Taiwan schema (endomorphosis/ipfs_malta_laws@404a1774ff3b276b5a92ae998c2592537614cf84). Its values are text and repealed_placeholder. The other columns follow endomorphosis/ipfs_india_laws.
• The secret scan (manifests/scan.json) ran on the staged files, not as a pre-commit hook, because nothing has been committed.

Config indiacode_states (India Code state/UT acts, direct collection, 2026-11-01)

• 10,544 state and union-territory acts across 36 states/UTs, collected directly from https://indiacode.gov.in (DSpace REST API, TLS, declared user agent, single attempt per request, no retries; 0 HTTP 403/503). One row per act; deduplicated by India Code item uuid. Files: data/indiacode_states/laws.parquet. The pilot laws / articles configs and their files are unchanged.
• text_status per row: ok 10,046; empty 431 (no text layer / no PDF); fetch_failed 15 (request timed out, single attempt); extracted_empty 52 (HTML section records with empty bodies; text carries section headings only).
• Overlap with the Common Crawl pilot (laws config): 65 of the pilot's 138 titles match an indiacode_states title (normalized title match). Both are kept; the pilot rows carry archive provenance, these rows carry live India Code handles.
• 730 rows share title and year with a central act in endomorphosis/ipfs_india_laws; they are state/UT-published copies under their own India Code handles and are kept as separate rows. Exact handle overlap with that hub: 0.

Terms / licence

• No open licence was found. The India Code terms page https://indiacode.gov.in/info/end-user-agreement returned only an empty application shell (HTTP 200, no terms text) when fetched on 2026-11-01.
• The legacy indiacode.nic.in disclaimer (https://www.indiacode.nic.in/disclaimer.jsp?abv=AR&col=null) reads, verbatim, in part — quoted from a web-search snippet; the page itself was not fetched:

  Material provided on this Site is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including, without limitation, warranty of fitness for a particular purpose. No State Government or Union territory Administration shall specifically make any warranties or representations as to the accuracy,completeness or adequacy of any such Material or the same being up-to-date. Please note that the Material available on the Site constitutes exact reproduction of officially adopted text in Pdf format.

  The updating and uploading of Rules, Regulations, Notifications, etc., and linking them with relevant sections of the respective Principal Act under which the said subordinate legislations have been made is the proprietary of the concerned Ministry/Department under respective States Governments and Union territory Administrations administering subject matter of the Legislation.

• Published per the project owner's decision of 2026-11-01 to upload these India state laws on the same basis as the pilot (see manifests/terms.json). No licence is claimed. Not legal advice; the official text prevails.