IndiaCode puts the statute book of India on one page per section: 10,000+ Acts, 2.7 lakh+ sections, 5,000+ reported judgments, free, no login, no ads over the text. Find the provision, read it, see how it is classified, and open the orders that construed it, from the same 30 crore+ case corpus you already search on eCourtsIndia. Live at indiacode.ecourtsindia.com.
IndiaCode by eCourtsIndia is independent. It is not the government’s India Code (indiacode.gov.in, formerly indiacode.nic.in), and the Gazette remains the authoritative text. Counts checked against the live IndiaCode corpus in October 2026.
Prefer a minute of video? Watch the one-minute IndiaCode walkthrough.
Key takeaways
- 10,000+ Acts (900+ Central, 9,000+ State) and 2.7 lakh+ sections, each with a permanent URL you can paste into a pleading, a client note or a WhatsApp message.
- 7,700+ State Acts that India Code holds only as a scanned gazette are read here by machine and split into 1,85,000+ sections. India Code has no text version of them, and every such page says it was machine-read.
- The First Schedule to the CPC is on the site as its own pages: 58 Orders and 728 Rules, so Order 7 Rule 11 is a page and not a scroll through 171 sections.
- Every section page carries the verbatim text, BNSS First Schedule classification where it is an offence, cross-references, and the reported judgments that decided it, each linking through to the order.
- Four old-law to new-law converters: IPC to BNS, CrPC to BNSS, Evidence Act to BSA, Income-tax 1961 to 2025. Both regimes stay live. Nothing redirects.
- Markdown, Akoma Ntoso XML and llms.txt for agents, free; programmatic access through the eCourtsIndia API and its statute tools on the eCourtsIndia MCP server, both on prepaid credits.
The statute half of eCourtsIndia
eCourtsIndia already answers the case half of a legal question: find the matter, read the order, follow the hearings, track it to disposal. IndiaCode answers the other half. If a judgment applied Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, you read Section 138 on the same platform, on a URL that will still work next year.
It sits alongside daily cause lists, the lawyer and judge directories, and tribunal benches from the company law forums to the Central Administrative Tribunal. Same index, same header search, no second login.
Free bare acts of India, one page per section
IndiaCode is a free, section-by-section edition of the statute book of India, where every Act and every section has its own page and its own permanent URL, cross-referenced to the rules made under it and to the judgments that have construed it.
Section 103 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita is indiacode.ecourtsindia.com/bns/section/103/ and that is the whole address. Act identifiers are the words people type: bns, bnss, bsa, cpc, ni-act, it-act, rti-act, companies-act.
| On the page | What you get |
|---|---|
| Sections nearby | The chapter, not an isolated snippet |
| Status and dates | In force or repealed, commencement, Act number, Ministry |
| Verbatim text | The provision as enacted, sub-section by sub-section |
| Old-law mapping | The provision it replaced, with a similarity score |
| Offence classification | BNSS First Schedule: punishment, cognizable, bailable, court |
| Cross-references | What refers to this section, and what it refers to |
| Related judgments | Reported orders that applied the provision, with a link through |
| Judgments citing it | Orders that quote the section in their text, with the passage |
| Machine formats | Markdown and Akoma Ntoso XML on predictable URLs; JSON through the eCourtsIndia API |
Does IndiaCode show the judgments on a section?
Yes, where they exist. Under the text of each provision, IndiaCode lists the reported judgments that construed it, with the court, the date and what the court held, each linking to the full order on eCourtsIndia. 5,000+ such attachments sit on the statute book today, each a reported judgment from the case index you already search on eCourtsIndia.
Below them sits a second list: judgments citing the section, meaning orders whose text quotes it, shown with the passage itself and the CNR. The first list is authority. The second is how the provision is actually being used in the courts this year. BNS 103 carries both, and the citing list already reaches High Court orders from 2025 and 2026.
On Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, the cheque-bounce provision comes with the Supreme Court line that shaped it, 15+ reported Supreme Court judgments as of October 2026, starting with MSR Leathers v. S. Palaniappan (10 September 2013, CNR SCIN010047712001). A judgment is attached only where the order’s own record says the court applied that provision, and only reported judgments qualify.
Because the reported set is curated, many sections have none listed; that does not mean the section was never litigated, so search the case index with the Act and section in the query. Start from the provision and look outward at the cases, the inverse of downloading an order by party name.
Does IndiaCode cover State Acts?
Yes, read off the scans. India Code publishes section-level text for the Central Acts and for a handful of States. For the rest it holds the Act as a record and a scanned gazette page, with nothing behind it. IndiaCode now reads those scans by machine and splits them into sections by their own numbering: 7,700+ State Acts, 1,85,000+ sections, text that India Code holds only as scans.
That took State coverage from a handful of jurisdictions to 35 States and Union Territories with section-level text. West Bengal, Karnataka, Kerala, Punjab, Haryana, Bihar, Odisha, Assam and Delhi all have readable statute books on the site now. Only Lakshadweep still has none, because the source has none. The background is in India’s State-law digitisation gap.
| Jurisdiction | Acts | Sections | Rules indexed |
|---|---|---|---|
| West Bengal | 800 | 17,070 | 1,130 |
| Karnataka | 345 | 14,433 | 877 |
| Maharashtra | 363 | 13,395 | 2,428 |
| Rajasthan | 341 | 11,605 | 1,328 |
| Kerala | 457 | 9,854 | 85 |
| Uttar Pradesh | 330 | 9,092 | 2,425 |
| Telangana | 290 | 8,798 | 46 |
| Punjab | 302 | 8,793 | 1,145 |
| Tamil Nadu | 384 | 8,433 | 521 |
| Haryana | 238 | 8,264 | 2,008 |
Machine-read text is labelled as such. Every such page carries an OCR label, meaning the words were read off an image and have not been checked against the page. The Government’s own scan is mirrored and linked from every one of those Acts, and where it matters you read the scan; OCR Is Not the Law explains how to verify before citing. A further 586 State Acts are listed with no text at all: their extracted text is searchable so you can find them, but it is not set out as the law, because the document is the authority. We would rather tell you which kind of page you are on than quietly blur the difference.
The First Schedule to the CPC, Order by Order
Civil procedure does not live in the sections of the Code of Civil Procedure. It lives in the First Schedule. A plaint is drawn under Order VII, an injunction sought under Order XXXIX, an appeal filed under Order XLI. IndiaCode now publishes all 58 Orders and 728 Rules as pages of their own.
Order 7 Rule 11, rejection of plaint, is one page with the Rules around it, the text, and both citation forms handled, because pleadings usually take the arabic form and judgments usually the numeral. Each Rule page also opens a full-text search over every order eCourtsIndia holds under that Rule, in either spelling. Typing Order 7 Rule 11 into the search box lands you there directly.
The tax law the official portal does not carry
The rate of income-tax for a year is not fixed by the Income-tax Act. It is fixed by the First Schedule to that year’s Finance Act, and India Code holds none of the Finance Acts. IndiaCode carries the Finance Acts from 1961 to 2026, section by section, First Schedules included, taken from the Department’s own typeset documents rather than a scan. Where India’s income-tax rates come from walks through the slab changes.
The same applies to the rules that run the assessment. Both the Income-tax Rules, 1962 and the Income-tax Rules, 2026 are on the site, each addressed as a rule rather than a section, alongside 553 prescribed forms as PDFs. Both Income-tax Acts sit here too: the 1961 Act as amended, and the 2025 Act that replaced it on 1 April 2026, with the Department’s section-level correspondence between them.
Old law and new, side by side
India changed three foundational codes on 1 July 2024 and its income-tax law on 1 April 2026. IndiaCode publishes four converters so both books stay in your hands.
| Converter | Provisions | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| IPC to BNS | 553 | 315 carried over, 161 close, 25 distant, 52 with no close match. Murder: 302 to 103 |
| CrPC to BNSS | 500 | 452 carried over. FIR, arrest, bail, cognizance, quashing in our CrPC to BNSS guide |
| Evidence Act to BSA | 185 | 155 carried over, both texts live on every row |
| Income-tax 1961 to 2025 | 1,134 | 871 with a counterpart, from the Department’s own correspondence (explained here) |
What a row says matters more than the count. Read from the converter pages in October 2026: IPC 302 goes to BNS 103 as “near-identical”, and the row also names the next-closest BNS texts, so you can see what was rejected. CrPC 482 goes to BNSS 528, the text being the same. IPC 420 maps to BNS 318 only as “close”, because section 318 folds the IPC cheating provisions into one section; the First Schedule on that page shows that the old section 420 offence is now 318(4), cognizable and non-bailable, while simple cheating under 318(2) is bailable. The income-tax rows are different in kind: section 80C of the 1961 Act to section 123 of the 2025 Act is labelled “official”, because it comes from the Department’s correspondence table rather than from comparing words.
How do I search IndiaCode?
Type a section number, a phrase people actually say, or a question. bns 103 lands on murder. cheque bounce lands on NI Act 138. Order 7 Rule 11 is a CPC page, not a dump of the whole Code. Ask is murder bailable and the answer comes back first, as the offence classification from the BNSS First Schedule: non-bailable, cognizable, triable by the Court of Session, both ways Section 103 is classified. Ask what is the BNS section for IPC 302 and the transition answers it.
Results are addressable at /search?q=, so a research query can be bookmarked and shared. The how-to is How to find any Indian Act or section.
There is also a recent searches page: a rolling log of what readers looked for and the provision that answered it. It is a useful map of the names people give the law, which are very often not the names the law gives itself. The Negotiable Instruments Act never says cheque bounce and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita never says mob lynching. The log shows only the query text, an approximate city and the time; it records no IP address, account or device identifier.
Browse by Act, by State, or by subject
Central Acts, 900+ of them, each with Act number and section count. The Constitution, 500+ articles and a filter box. By subject, Acts grouped into subject shelves, tax and education and local government the largest of them. State legislation, 9,000+ State Acts and 2.2 lakh+ sections across 35 jurisdictions with section-level text.
There is also a smaller list worth knowing about: 18 Acts on the statute book that are not operating, four never brought into force and fourteen spent. Neither group is repealed, and neither is easy to find anywhere else.
Rules, notifications and subordinate legislation
Rules and notifications indexes 43,000+ instruments made under the Acts: 28,562 notifications, 7,865 sets of rules, 2,911 circulars, 2,059 regulations, 1,258 orders, and 237 Regulations made by the President under article 240, which have the force of an Act of Parliament for their Union Territory.
31,563 of them carry their English text (October 2026), and many have the source document itself mirrored and served from our own storage rather than hot-linked. Each is joined to the provision it was made under, which is the compliance question: which instruments rest on this section, and what changed when one of them was amended. Where the parent Act was read out of the enacting formula rather than recorded by the source, the entry says inferred instead of recorded, so you know which kind of link you are looking at. More in The Law Below India’s Acts.
Built for machines: API, Markdown, XML, MCP
Markdown and Akoma Ntoso XML on every provision, free, and API access through the eCourtsIndia API. IndiaCode no longer runs a separate keyless API: the corpus is served by the Acts and Sections endpoints of the eCourtsIndia API, with a Bearer token and prepaid credits (₹0.15 per section, ₹0.05 on a subscription, ₹200 free on signup). Agents: llms.txt. The write-up, including llms.txt, Akoma Ntoso and API examples: How to find any Indian Act or section: search, Markdown and the API.
/{act}/section/{number}.mdand.xmlon IndiaCode for Markdown and Akoma NtosoGET /api/partner/acts/{key}/sections/{number}for text, offence classification and equivalents (the BNS key is2023/45, the IPC1860/45)/api/partner/acts/{key}/sections/{number}/equivalentsfor IPC to BNS, CrPC to BNSS and Evidence Act to BSA/api/partner/acts/search?q=for full text, and/api/partner/acts/resolve?name=to turn an Act’s name into its keyPOST /api/partner/acts/sections/batchfor up to 50 sections in one call/api/partner/acts/status, free, for the corpus version and counts
All of these sit on https://webapi.ecourtsindia.com, documented at ecourtsindia.com/api/docs.
The corpus is also served as tools rather than pages. The statute tools on the eCourtsIndia MCP server, search_statute, resolve_act, lookup_provision, lookup_provisions, lookup_case_provisions, map_provision, get_cpc_rule and lookup_offence, read exactly this corpus through the same API and are charged like it once you connect with an eCourtsIndia sign-in, so an assistant can resolve IPC 302 to BNS 103 or check whether an offence is bailable as a tool call instead of scraping a page. Setup is in our guide to connecting the eCourtsIndia MCP to Claude.
Bulk CSV downloads are no longer offered; for many sections at once, use the batch endpoint. Statute data and case data now share one eCourtsIndia API, one token and one credit balance.
Who this is for
The advocate who wants the provision and the authority in one place. The litigant who was just told the section they are charged under. The district practitioner whose State Act has never been readable online before. The compliance officer tracing which notification sits under which power. The student who wants the statute book as a dataset. In-house teams running due diligence on the eCourtsIndia API can resolve a charged section to its text and its case law in the same pipeline. On the criminal side, the FIR that started the matter is often the first document you need, and eCourtsIndia Crime Reports holds 25 lakh+ FIR PDFs collected from a dozen states and UTs.
Start at indiacode.ecourtsindia.com, or go straight to the section you were looking for.
Read next
- How to find any Indian Act or section
- IndiaCode and the official India Code portal
- IPC to BNS: 40 sections a trial court uses
- 50 BNS sections every Indian lawyer should know
Frequently Asked Questions
Where can I read bare acts of India online for free?
IndiaCode by eCourtsIndia (indiacode.ecourtsindia.com) gives every Central and State Act its own free page, section by section: 10,000+ Acts and 2.7 lakh+ sections, with no login or advertisements over the text. The government’s India Code (indiacode.gov.in, formerly indiacode.nic.in) is the official repository, and the Gazette remains the authoritative text for anything you file.
Is IndiaCode by eCourtsIndia the same as the government’s India Code?
No. India Code (indiacode.gov.in, formerly indiacode.nic.in) is the government’s official repository of Acts. IndiaCode by eCourtsIndia is an independent, free reader built on top of public sources: it adds a permanent URL for every section, old-to-new law mappings and reported judgments, with API access through the eCourtsIndia API. For notified text and repeal history, check India Code or the Gazette.
Can I read State Acts section by section on IndiaCode?
Yes, for 35 of the 36 States and Union Territories (Lakshadweep has no source text). Over 9,000 State Acts are split into sections. Many of them exist on India Code only as scanned gazette pages, so IndiaCode reads them by machine and labels each such page as OCR text, with the government scan linked. Check the scan before quoting OCR text in a pleading.
How do I convert an IPC section to the BNS?
Open the IPC to BNS converter on IndiaCode, or search IPC 302 and follow the mapping: IPC 302 (murder) became BNS 103. Each row shows how much text carried over. The criminal-code mappings are text comparisons, not an official correspondence table, so confirm the new section before citing it. CrPC to BNSS and Evidence Act to BSA converters work the same way.
Does IndiaCode list the judgments on each section?
It shows two lists where available. The first is reported judgments that applied the provision, a curated set of 5,000+ mapped across the statute book. The second is orders that quote the section, shown with the passage and CNR. Many sections have neither, which does not mean they were never litigated; search the case index for that.
Is there an API for Indian bare acts?
Yes, through the eCourtsIndia API. IndiaCode no longer runs a keyless API of its own: the corpus is served by the Acts and Sections endpoints at webapi.ecourtsindia.com, with a Bearer token and prepaid credits (₹0.15 per section, ₹200 free on signup). Each section can still be read free as Markdown and Akoma Ntoso XML on predictable URLs. AI assistants can use the same corpus through the eCourtsIndia MCP server’s statute tools, which are charged like the API.
Can I read CPC Order 7 Rule 11 on IndiaCode?
Yes. The First Schedule to the Code of Civil Procedure is published as its own pages: 58 Orders and 728 Rules. Order 7 Rule 11 (rejection of plaint) has its own URL, and the search box accepts both Order 7 Rule 11 and Order VII Rule 11. Each Rule page also links to a full-text search of orders that cite it.