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

Published 26 July 2026 · politics

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

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.