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What this is

Vidhipandit is an independent, read-only index of Indian court judgments. The unit of the site is the judgment itself, not an article written about it: every page is either a judgment, a list of judgments, or a way to find one. There is no paywall, no login, and no account -- every published judgment on this site is free to read in full.

Where the corpus comes from

The base corpus is built from the Indian High Court / Supreme Court Judgments dataset, a public, volunteer-maintained bulk archive of scanned and text-extracted judgments, licensed under CC-BY-4.0. That licence requires attribution, which is why the same sentence appears on every judgment page and on the homepage: “Contains information from the Indian High Court / Supreme Court Judgments dataset, licensed under CC-BY-4.0.” We did not create this underlying material and make no claim to have done so.

On top of that base, Vidhipandit runs its own live feeds against the Supreme Court's and participating High Courts' own public case-status and judgment-listing pages, so the index keeps extending past the dataset's own cut-off rather than going stale the day it was published.

Method: extraction, then a gate, then publication

Every incoming judgment goes through the same pipeline before it can appear on this site, and every step is a narrowing, never a widening, of what gets published:

  1. Text extraction. A scanned judgment PDF is converted to plain text so it can be searched and read as text, not just viewed as an image.
  2. The redaction gate. Every document's text is checked against the statutory reporting restrictions that make certain disclosures a criminal offence in India -- see the editorial policy for the specific statutes. The default is withheld, not published. A document is published only when the gate has positively cleared it; an error during evaluation is treated the same as a match and gates the document. Nothing about this is manual or editorial-judgment-based -- it is a fixed rule set, applied identically to every document, and the rule version behind every decision is recorded so a rule change can be replayed across the whole corpus.
  3. Publication. Only a document the gate has cleared is ever readable through this site -- by citation, by search, or by any of the browse pages. A withheld document simply does not exist as far as any page here is concerned; there is no preview, no partial view, and no indication of what it might have contained.

This is a mechanical safeguard, not a claim that every publication decision this pipeline makes is beyond challenge. If you believe a published judgment discloses something it should not, or that a withheld judgment was withheld in error, see Corrections or the named Grievance Officer.

What Vidhipandit is not

This is not a law firm, not a legal-advice service, and not a case-management tool. Nothing on this site is legal advice, and reading a judgment here is not a substitute for consulting an advocate about your own matter -- see the Terms of Use.

Masthead

Who publishes this site, who holds editorial responsibility for it, and the organisation behind it -- the disclosure a digital news publisher carries under the IT Rules, 2021.

Not yet published. This disclosure has not yet been supplied by the operator. We are not drafting it on their behalf, and we will not put a plausible-looking placeholder here in its place. Until it is supplied, reach us through the Grievance Officer, who is named, contactable and answerable on a stated statutory timetable.