Why India must modernise the way the government publishes laws and regulations

When the Transvaal government enacted the notorious “Black Act” against Indians in 1906, Mahatma Gandhi’s first act was not to protest but to translate the ordinance and publish it in full in his newspaper, Indian Opinion, so that ordinary Indians could read for themselves exactly what was being done to them. Gandhi understood that a community cannot defend its rights against a law it cannot read.

Today a variety of laws govern us: Acts and their amendments, rules, regulations, BIS standards, road standards, circulars, municipal bylaws, and more. Yet there is no single place to find out what the law actually is — it lies scattered across multiple websites. The rule of law requires that Bills presented before Parliament or a State Assembly be made known to the people in advance, that citizens are aware of the laws and amendments in force, and that the judiciary knows the state of the law it adjudicates. In reality, Bills are often not placed in the public domain before they are introduced. Citizens struggle to find the law in force, and even when they locate a copy, determining what the law was on a given date is a battle of its own.

Lost in the gazettes

As a legal publisher, we were incorporating the changes made by the Code of Criminal Procedure (Amendment) Act, 2005 into the principal Act. The amendment left it to the government to decide when its various sections would come into force, so we began searching the gazettes for the notifications bringing them into effect. To our surprise, we could find no gazette notifying Sections 16, 25, 28(a), 28(b), 38, 42(a), 42(b), 42(f)(iii) and (iv), and 44(a). We filed an RTI application with the Ministry of Home Affairs, which confirmed that these sections have never been notified. In other words, more than two decades later, they are still not valid law.

The government uses gazettes as its primary means of publishing laws and bringing them into force. These gazettes are published as PDFs, a format created in the early 1990s to ensure that a digital document looks identical on every device by embedding fonts and images. While this makes PDFs easy to share and print, it also makes it very hard to extract the structure and meaning of a legal document. A law is inherently hierarchical — chapters, parts, sections, subsections — but a PDF exposes none of that hierarchy. Many gazettes published in regional languages contain proprietary fonts, which look fine on a PDF viewer but cannot be searched in regional language or read on any websites.

Learning from global standards

Governments in several countries have moved to publishing laws in markup languages that properly capture their structure, semantics and the local languages. Many African countries have adopted the Akoma Ntoso standard, a markup language specifically designed for legal documents. They use an open-source legal publishing platform called Indigo, which allows users to add or edit laws. You can apply amendments to an Act and see precisely what changed across successive amendments — and what the law was at any given point in time. Subordinate rules and regulations can also be tagged to their principal Act and amended in the same way.

The United States publishes its laws in a variant of Akoma Ntoso called USLM (United States Legislative Markup). Every law and amendment is published in USLM, while the PDF and HTML versions are generated automatically from it using a stylesheet. All past issues of the Federal Register have also been converted and are available for bulk download. As a result, not only commercial legal vendors but also nonprofits, think tanks and others can use them to help citizens better engage with their democracy.

The United Kingdom publishes its legislation at legislation.gov.uk, run by The National Archives. The base format for the content is the Crown Legislation Markup Language (CLML), another modified version of Akoma Ntoso. The National Archives has stated that it aims to move towards Akoma Ntoso because it is emerging as the international standard, is less complex, and is supported by a wider pool of experts and suppliers.

Making the law accessible

While the rest of the world has moved away from PDF publishing, we remain dependent on a standard that was built more than three decades back. Until we upgrade the government’s legal publishing software stack, access to the law will remain unnecessarily difficult for citizens, lawyers, judges and other stakeholders in a democracy.

The Internet itself was built on open standards. People came together to standardise communication protocols, which every stakeholder then adopted. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar often reminded us that a democracy needs more than a government “for the people”; it needs a government “by the people.” Laws are the raw material of our democracy, and leaving their publication to a handful of contractors will only deepen the obscurity. If instead the government consults its citizens and standardises legal publishing, it could transform how the state communicates with the people and make them an active part of democracy.

(Sushant Sinha did his PhD in Computer Science from University of Michigan and is the founder of legal search engine, Indian Kanoon)