India needs a single source of truth for all laws: a markup language fix

India's legal system has a visibility problem. The Government of India Act, 1935, was the last gasp of a colonial empire. In 1950, the Constituent Assembly wrote a constitution that delivered elections and gave citizens a voice, but the administrative state has struggled to shift from ruling to governing, two policy experts argue in a new piece for Mint.

Rahul Matthan, a partner at Trilegal, and Teamlease Services co-founder R. Srinivasan make the case for a legislative markup language called Bharat Niti Lipi (BNL). The idea: a single, live, searchable digital repository of all Indian laws, published in a structured format that computers can read and cross-reference.

Three problems block that single source of truth, they write: jurisdiction fragmentation, instrument proliferation, and technology.

Central, state, and local governments all make laws, but publication is scattered across the ministries of law, IT, and housing in the Union government alone. Compliance is created by more than 25 types of edicts – circulars, regulations, guidelines, memos, FAQs, press notes – many of which are not even notified in the Gazette. Most Indian laws are published as PDFs, and only a small subset are machine-readable; the rest are scans of paper documents that search engines and compliance software cannot process.

BNL is technically an XML vocabulary designed as an Indian profile of the international Akoma Ntoso standard, which the UN developed to help African parliaments put statutes online. The US uses the United States Legislative Markup (USLM) language; the UK has its Crown Legislation Markup Language (CLML). Both are aligning with Akoma Ntoso equivalents over time, Matthan and Srinivasan note, allowing countries to inherit tools while retaining sovereign control.

Once laws are published in this format, every amendment and revision gets a traceable change-log. The system distinguishes when a provision went into force from the moment it was enacted. Cross-references to other statutes and subordinate regulations become clickable links, not footnotes.

To work, BNL must be mandated by law. In a previous article, Matthan and Srinivasan proposed a Jan Vishwas Ashwasan (guarantee) that no law left out of a canonical repository called Jan Vishwas Sangreh needs to be complied with. That guarantee could be extended to require BNL format for all laws in the repository.

India's Parliament passed the Code of Criminal Procedure (Amendment) Act of 2005. The President assented. It was published in the Gazette. But 10 of its provisions never came into force. The Act left it to the government to decide when each section would go into effect, and for ten of them, that never happened. No one noticed, the authors write, because there was no way to notice.

Structure makes the law legible to technology. When laws have to be presented in a prescribed format, those who draft them have to be more precise, with little room for the vagueness that lets unnotified provisions and forgotten contradictions survive. AI and future compliance tools can take advantage of the clarity.

The authors frame the problem as a constitutional one: the lack of a single source of truth undermines the spirit and letter of the constitution, which was born out of an antibiotic reaction to tyranny. But they end with a couplet from the poet Bulleh Shah: "Naa jaane haqq di taaqat, rabb naa deve uss nu himmat" – those who don't know the strength of their rights, the universe doesn't give them courage.