> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://vaquill.ai/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# India legislation coverage
> What the Indian legislation API holds: acts, sections and jurisdictions, how deep the amendment and repeal record goes, and the limits you would otherwise discover in production
**64,179 served acts and 745,970 distinct sections**, covering Union legislation, the legislation of
every State and Union Territory we hold, and instruments issued by statutory regulators.
Act-level figures were measured by a full distinct-act scan on **2026-09-06**.
```bash theme={"theme":"github-dark"}
# The live, self-describing answer. Free, and authoritative over this page.
curl https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/in/acts/coverage \
-H "Authorization: Bearer vq_key_..."
```
This is a separate corpus, a separate OpenAPI document and a separate set of routes from the US
statutes API.
Nothing on this page describes the US surface, and no `corpusType` token from the US API applies
here.
**Two different units, measured two different ways.**
A **section** is one distinct (act, section) pair, and it is the unit a lawyer thinks in.
A **passage** is one retrieval chunk, and a section spans about 3.4 of them, so the collection
holds far more passages than sections.
Act and section counts on this page come from a dated scan; passage counts on
`GET /acts/coverage` are faceted live.
Divide passages by sections if you must, never multiply sections by anything, and never read a
passage count as a section count.
## What the corpus holds
Distinct acts and distinct (act, section) pairs, measured 2026-09-06.
| | Acts | Sections |
| ---------------------------- | ---------: | ----------: |
| Served | **64,179** | **745,970** |
| Retired, held but not served | 703 | not served |
| Total distinct act ids | 64,882 | |
Served acts are indexed as **2,461,060 retrieval passages**, inside a collection of 2,532,537
points that also carries the retired records.
### By category
`category` is the top-level split, and it is what you filter on when you want a whole class of
instrument rather than one jurisdiction.
| `category` | Acts | What the word means |
| ------------ | -----: | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `state` | 32,268 | Legislation of a State or Union Territory legislature, and state subordinate instruments. The `state` filter narrows within this. |
| `central` | 19,965 | Legislation of the Union Parliament, and central subordinate instruments made under it. |
| `regulatory` | 11,946 | Instruments issued by a statutory regulator (SEBI, RBI, MCA, TRAI, IRDAI and others) under powers delegated by an act. The `department` filter narrows within this. |
`repealed` and `spent` are also accepted as `category` values for backward compatibility.
They resolve against `act_status` rather than `category`, so they select acts the publisher records
as repealed or spent in any jurisdiction.
`GET /acts/coverage` publishes this same legend as `categoryLegend`, and
`GET /acts/filters` returns the live vocabulary with counts, free.
### By publisher status
| `actStatus` | Acts |
| ------------ | -----: |
| `in_force` | 60,719 |
| `repealed` | 3,404 |
| `superseded` | 55 |
| `spent` | 1 |
Read [Status is a claim, not our verdict](#status-is-a-claim-not-our-verdict) before treating any of
these as a currency judgement.
### Subordinate instruments
**37,013 of the 64,179 served acts are subordinate instruments**: rules, regulations, notifications
and orders made under a parent act rather than enacted by a legislature.
Include or exclude them with the `isSubordinate` filter on search.
Every response that names a parent resolves it **by title match, not by a stored key**, and says so
in `matchBasis`.
Title matching resolves a parent for 85.8% of the instruments that name one.
The stored `parent_act_id` field is not usable for this: all 35,502 values are the publisher's own
identifiers, not ours, so a hard link would resolve to nothing.
## Jurisdictions
Distinct acts and sections per jurisdiction, measured 2026-09-06, sorted by act volume.
The middle column is the literal value to pass to the `state` filter.
**These rows sum to 45,578 acts and 574,399 sections, not to the corpus total.**
18,601 served acts carry no jurisdiction value at all and cannot appear here.
Most of them are the 11,946 regulator instruments, which are filed under `category=regulatory`
with no state, and the rest are central legislation that carries no jurisdiction key.
Reach those with `category`, not with `state`.
| Jurisdiction | `state` | Acts | Sections |
| ----------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------ | -----: | -------: |
| Central (Union) | `central` | 13,514 | 176,900 |
| Maharashtra | `maharashtra` | 2,844 | 27,163 |
| Uttar Pradesh | `uttar-pradesh` | 2,799 | 18,329 |
| Delhi | `delhi` | 2,359 | 22,113 |
| Haryana | `haryana` | 2,209 | 15,555 |
| West Bengal | `west-bengal` | 1,927 | 23,924 |
| Chhattisgarh | `chhattisgarh` | 1,923 | 23,127 |
| Madhya Pradesh | `madhya-pradesh` | 1,895 | 17,647 |
| Rajasthan | `rajasthan` | 1,753 | 26,106 |
| Punjab | `punjab` | 1,511 | 19,751 |
| Karnataka | `karnataka` | 1,326 | 22,571 |
| Bihar | `bihar` | 1,230 | 10,230 |
| Assam | `assam` | 1,217 | 6,218 |
| Tamil Nadu | `tamil-nadu` | 945 | 15,987 |
| Jharkhand | `jharkhand` | 943 | 12,056 |
| Chandigarh | `chandigarh` | 773 | 10,563 |
| Tripura | `tripura` | 767 | 8,419 |
| Kerala | `kerala` | 664 | 12,783 |
| Odisha | `odisha` | 528 | 7,084 |
| Goa | `goa` | 392 | 13,338 |
| Himachal Pradesh | `himachal-pradesh` | 382 | 8,862 |
| Arunachal Pradesh | `arunachal-pradesh` | 381 | 5,232 |
| Gujarat | `gujarat` | 375 | 6,983 |
| Telangana | `telangana` | 342 | 9,149 |
| Uttarakhand | `uttarakhand` | 315 | 3,275 |
| Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu **\[split]** | `dadra-and-nagar-haveli-and-daman-and-diu` | 298 | 8,233 |
| Andhra Pradesh | `andhra-pradesh` | 259 | 6,410 |
| Nagaland | `nagaland` | 248 | 2,279 |
| Manipur | `manipur` | 232 | 2,509 |
| Andaman and Nicobar Islands **\[split]** | `andaman-and-nicobar-islands` | 201 | 4,604 |
| Meghalaya | `meghalaya` | 149 | 3,112 |
| Dadra and Nagar Haveli **\[split]** | `dadra-nagar-haveli` | 146 | 5,048 |
| Mizoram | `mizoram` | 138 | 1,206 |
| Sikkim | `sikkim` | 138 | 1,576 |
| Puducherry | `puducherry` | 137 | 4,934 |
| Jammu and Kashmir **\[split]** | `jammu-kashmir` | 128 | 4,352 |
| Jammu and Kashmir **\[split]** | `jammu-and-kashmir` | 79 | 2,296 |
| Ladakh | `ladakh` | 68 | 2,210 |
| Andaman and Nicobar Islands **\[split]** | `andaman-nicobar` | 37 | 2,060 |
| Lakshadweep | `lakshadweep` | 6 | 205 |
**\[split] marks three jurisdictions that are stored under two slugs each, and a single-slug filter
will silently miss the other half.**
Jammu and Kashmir is `jammu-kashmir` (128 acts) and `jammu-and-kashmir` (79).
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are `andaman-and-nicobar-islands` (201) and `andaman-nicobar`
(37).
Dadra and Nagar Haveli is `dadra-and-nagar-haveli-and-daman-and-diu` (298) and
`dadra-nagar-haveli` (146).
Pass both slugs, or use search without a `state` filter and read the value off each result, until
this is fixed at ingest.
## Depth: what we hold about an act, not just the act
This is the part of the page to read before you build on this API.
"We hold the text of this act" and "we hold the record of what amended it" are different claims,
and only the first is true for most of the corpus.
`GET /acts/coverage` publishes the same four columns as a `depth` block so your code can read them
rather than trusting this page.
| Claim | Acts | Share of 64,179 |
| --------------------------------------------------- | ---------: | --------------: |
| We serve the publisher's text | **64,179** | 100% |
| We hold a machine-readable citation | 64,117 | 99.9% |
| We serve a link to the publisher's own document | 57,316 | 89.3% |
| We hold parsed chapter or part hierarchy | 16,465 | 25.7% |
| We hold at least one **structured amendment event** | **1,061** | **1.7%** |
| We hold a repeal claim | 655 | 1.0% |
A further **840 acts carry a non-zero amendment count with no parseable amendment record behind
them**.
Those acts return an empty event list, and the response says so in its own `coverage` block rather
than leaving the emptiness to be read as "nothing ever changed".
1,901 acts claim an amendment; we hold the events for 1,061 of them.
### Inside the amendment record
| | Records |
| --------------------------------- | -------------: |
| Structured amendment records held | **32,808** |
| carrying an ISO effective date | 17,333 (52.8%) |
| carrying the quoted original text | 11,568 (35.3%) |
About 3.15% of those records (1,035) are exact duplicates of another record on the same section,
so a count of events on one provision can overstate the number of distinct amendments.
Every event carries an `appliedStatus`.
It is `not_applied` on all of them, because of the next point.
## Limits you would otherwise find in production
### We do not apply amendments to the text we serve
We serve the publisher's text as published.
We do not rewrite it to incorporate the amendments we list.
Every amendment event states this on itself, so currency never has to be inferred from silence.
There is consequently **no point-in-time text reconstruction on this API**.
An `asOf` parameter over unversioned text would be a wrong answer shaped like a right one, so it is
not offered.
The US statutes API does offer point-in-time reconstruction; that is a different corpus with
versioned editions behind it.
### Status is a claim, not our verdict
`actStatus`, `repealedBy` and `repealedByYear` are the publisher's statements.
We do not verify that a repealing Act was ever brought into force, and at least one repeal on
record involves an Act that never commenced.
`GET /acts/{actId}/status` keeps three vocabularies apart on purpose:
* `publisherStatus`, which is India Code's claim;
* `servedStatus`, which is our own serving decision;
* `repealClaim`, which is the repeal record plus our caveat, including `commencementVerified`.
A derived `goodLawStatus` maps an unverified repeal claim to **`unknown`**, not to `not_good_law`.
The Factories Act, 1948 is the worked example: its recorded repeal is by the Industrial Relations
Code, 2020, which has never been brought into force.
### `GET /acts/list` cannot see most of the corpus
`GET /acts/list` enumerates about **22,000 of the roughly 64,000 served acts**.
It reads a separate act table that predates the current corpus, so about two thirds of what
`POST /acts/search` will happily return is invisible to it.
Every `/list` response now carries a `note` saying so.
Use `POST /acts/search` for discovery, and `GET /acts/coverage` for what exists.
An act id you cannot find through `/list` is very often held; a `notFound` from a lookup route is
more often a discovery gap than a corpus gap.
A properly paged act-level index is the fix and it is not built yet.
### 10.7% of acts carry no link to the publisher's document
We serve `sourceUrl` for 57,316 acts, which is 89.3%.
The remaining 6,863 return a **named reason** rather than a bare null, so "we have no link" is
distinguishable from "not applicable".
The main cause is that India Code migrated from `indiacode.nic.in` to `indiacode.gov.in` around
2026-08-19 and re-minted every item handle with no redirect map.
The stored deep links are not merely stale, they 404.
They are blanked rather than rewritten, because pointing an old handle at the new host produces a
different 404 that merely looks current.
An empty provenance URL is allowed; a broken one would be a false statement.
Only live official Indian publishers are served in this field: `.gov.in` and `.nic.in` hosts, plus
`rbi.org.in`, the Reserve Bank of India.
No commercial legal database is a source or a link target.
### 703 acts are retired and are not served
They are held and deliberately withheld: 305 as duplicates of an act we kept, 190 as withdrawn by
the publisher, and 208 with no reason recorded.
Nothing was deleted.
A retired act returns 404 with a reason from the text and amendment routes, and is refunded.
`GET /acts/{actId}/status` answers it rather than 404ing, with `servedStatus: retired` and the
reason, because "we withdrew this" is a more useful answer than "no such thing".
### Citation strings are served with known cosmetic defects
`citation` is present on 99.9% of served acts and is what you would paste into a brief, so these
are worth knowing about before you render it verbatim:
* **6,646 acts (10.4%)** have a title ending in a period, so the citation reads
`The Maharashtra Value Added Tax Act, 2002., s. 23`.
* **3,003 acts (4.7%)** carry no year in the title and no year field, so the citation identifies no
edition.
Both are ingest repairs, not serving bugs, and neither affects which provision you get back.
### The IPC to BNS mapping is a curated slice, not a complete table
`GET /acts/corresponding-provisions/{actCode}` holds **30 mapped pairs against the Indian Penal
Code's 511 sections, about 6%**.
The response states `mappedProvisions`, `isComplete: false`, and that the basis is curated rather
than official.
Both codes remain live law simultaneously for the lifetime of pending trials, so a mapping is a
research aid and not a substitution rule.
## Endpoints and what they cost
Twelve routes, all under `https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/in/acts`.
Costs are in API credits, taken from the live pricing matrix; `GET /api-credits/pricing` is
authoritative.
| Route | Credits | What it answers |
| ----------------------------------------- | ------: | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `GET /coverage` | **0** | What the corpus holds, by jurisdiction, regulator and status, and how deep that holding goes. |
| `GET /filters` | **0** | The live filter vocabulary with counts. |
| `POST /search` | 2 | Search Central, State and regulator legislation down to the individual section. |
| `GET /list` | 1 | Browse enactments by jurisdiction, regulator, year and status. See the coverage limit above. |
| `GET /{actId}/status` | 1 | Whether an enactment is still law, as three separate statements rather than one verdict. |
| `GET /corresponding-provisions/{actCode}` | 1 | IPC to BNS and CrPC to BNSS section mapping. |
| `GET /{actId}/structure` | 2 | The act's table of contents: chapters and parts where the publisher gives any, and the provisions under each. |
| `GET /{actId}/sections/{n}` | 2 | One provision as a resource: its citation, its place in the act, and what it refers to. |
| `GET /{actId}/sections/{n}/history` | 2 | Every amendment recorded against one provision, with the amending act, its section, and the effective date where published. |
| `GET /{actId}/text` | 3 | The source text URLs for one enactment, pointing at the publisher's own document. |
| `GET /{actId}/sections/{n}/body` | 3 | The publisher's full text for one provision. Refunded when the text cannot be reproduced. |
| `GET /{actId}/amendments` | 5 | The amendment history recorded for a whole enactment. |
Full request and response shapes are in the [India API Reference](https://api.vaquill.ai/in/openapi.json).
`GET /acts/coverage` is free for the same reason the US coverage endpoint is: a consumer who
cannot see what the corpus holds cannot tell a gap from a bad query, and charging for that answer
compounds the confusion.
## Sources and refresh
The corpus is built from **India Code**, the Government of India's official repository of Central
and State legislation, and from statutory regulators' own sites for the `regulatory` category.
No commercial database is a source.
India Code is re-swept on a weekly cadence, and each sweep is diffed against the previous one to
produce added, changed and withdrawn sets.
Act-level counts on this page move only when a new census scan is run, which is why every figure
here is stamped with the date it was measured.
The separate US statutes corpus: federal, all 52 state and territory jurisdictions, and agency
guidance.
One `vq_key_` credential and one credit ledger serve both jurisdictions.