India Must Modernise the Way Govt. Publishes Laws and Regulations

Syllabus: GS2/Governance

Context

• India’s legal publishing system remains fragmented and dependent on PDFs, making it difficult for citizens, lawyers and even courts to access, track laws and amendments in force.
  • Adopting open legal publishing standards would make laws more accessible and strengthen democratic participation.

About

• The rule of law requires that Bills presented before Parliament or a State Assembly be made known to the people in advance.
  • It ensures 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 challenge.
• The government uses gazettes as its primary means of publishing laws and bringing them into force.
  • These gazettes are published as PDFs, 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. 

Concerns

• Difficulty in Tracking Amendments: Frequent amendments across multiple Acts and notifications make it challenging to identify the current version of a law or determine the legal position on a specific date.
• Fragmented Legal Information: Legal texts are dispersed across different gazettes, ministries, and websites without a unified, machine-readable repository, creating inconsistencies and duplication.
• Inefficiency for the Judiciary and Legal Professionals: Judges, lawyers, researchers, and businesses spend considerable time verifying the latest applicable legal provisions, increasing litigation costs and delays.
• Weak Democratic Participation: Inaccessible legal information hampers citizens’ ability to understand, debate, and participate effectively in the legislative process, undermining transparency and accountability.

How Laws are Published in Other Countries?

• 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.
  • One 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.
• The United States publishes its laws in a variant of Akoma Ntoso called USLM (United States Legislative Markup). 
  • 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. 

Way Ahead

• While the rest of the world has moved away from PDF publishing, India remains 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.
• If 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.

Source: TH