Which Rules Sit Under This Section? Mapping Subordinate Legislation in India for Compliance Teams

Last updated: 3 November 2026

Key takeaways

• The preamble is the map. A rule or notification names the sections that authorise it in its opening words. That list, not the title, tells you which section the instrument sits under.
• One instrument can sit under a dozen sections. The Companies (Incorporation) Second Amendment Rules, 2022 cite eleven sections of the Companies Act, 2013, read with the general power in section 469.
• Check more than one list. The Motor Vehicles Act page lists 2021 and 2022 amendments and drafts; older amendment rules turn up through the rules index. The principal Central Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989 did not appear in either.
• Parent links are labelled recorded or inferred. Treat an inferred link as a lead. Some instruments are held as a citation only, with no text.
• Nothing is consolidated. Amendments and supersessions are separate instruments. The Gazette is the authority.

What is subordinate legislation, and why does compliance live there?

Subordinate legislation is the working layer of Indian law: the Act states the duty, and the rules made under it say who files what, on which form, by when, and for how much. A compliance register that stops at the Act will miss most of the dates and forms an officer is actually tested on.

Our earlier post The Law Below India’s Acts explains the instrument classes and why parent links need provenance. This guide is the practical sequel for compliance and RegTech teams: how to go from one section to the instruments under it, with three worked examples run on IndiaCode and through the eCourtsIndia statute tools, and how to automate the walk.

Instrument	Usually made by	What it typically does	IndiaCode holds
Rules	Central or State Government under a rule-making section	Forms, fees, procedure, prescribed detail	7,800+
Notifications	Government, published in the Gazette	Commencement, exemptions, rates, appointments	28,000+
Regulations	A regulator under its statute	Regulator-made norms	2,000+
Circulars	A department or board	Administrative instructions; legal force to be assessed separately	2,900+
Orders	Government or authority	Specific directions, designations	1,200+

As of 3 November 2026 the index lists 43,376 instruments across these classes, and 31,563 of them carry their English text on the site. The rest keep their citation, parent Act, year and ministry, and link to the source document. A good share of State material is published in Hindi only, and where a document carried no usable English the entry says so rather than showing an empty page.

How do you find the rules made under a particular section?

Read the Act’s rule-making section, list the instruments made under the Act, then open each instrument and match the sections named in its preamble to the section you care about. The six steps below work for any Central or State Act on IndiaCode.

1. Find the power. Most Acts have a general rule-making section near the end (section 469 of the Companies Act, 2013; section 57 of the Maharashtra Rent Control Act, 1999) and sometimes chapter-specific powers. Note who holds the power: the Central Government, the State, or a regulator.
2. List the instruments. Open the Act’s page on IndiaCode and scroll to “Rules made under this Act”, or filter the rules index by the Act. Through the API, search with the Act’s name and, for State law, the State code.
3. Read the preamble. Every rule and notification opens with “In exercise of the powers conferred by…”. Copy the section list exactly, including sub-sections and “read with”.
4. Map instrument to section. Record each instrument against every section its preamble names. This is the section-level map.
5. Follow the chain. Look for later amendment rules, supersessions, rescissions and commencement notifications. Each is its own instrument.
6. Verify. Check the Gazette notification number and date (G.S.R., S.O. or the State’s number) before you cite or rely on it.

Worked example 1: which rules sit under the Companies Act, 2013?

The Companies Act’s rules rest on section 469, read with the specific section that asks for something to be prescribed; the preamble of each rule names both. We started there.

Section 469 (read via the eCourtsIndia MCP, 3 November 2026) gives the Central Government power to make rules “for carrying out the provisions of this Act” and, in sub-section (2), for any matter the Act requires to be prescribed. Sub-section (3) lets a rule provide for a fine that may extend to five thousand rupees, and five hundred rupees a day for a continuing contravention. Sub-section (4) requires every rule, and every SEBI regulation under the Act, to be laid before each House of Parliament for thirty days.

The Companies Act page on IndiaCode lists its rules under the heading “Rules made under this Act”. When we read it, the list was almost all amendment rules from 2022 and 2023, such as G.S.R. 36(E) of 20 January 2023 on the registration of foreign companies, and an S.O. designating a Special Court in Jharkhand. The page says India Code publishes rules as a record and a document, so the Act page indexes them rather than reproducing them. The full set sits in the rules index.

Search behaves differently. We asked search_statute for “Companies (Incorporation) Rules, 2014” on 3 November 2026. It returned 482 matches. The first three were sections of the two Income-tax Acts, which mention the Companies Act in their definitions, followed by the Companies (Share Capital and Debentures) Rules, 2014 and four Incorporation amendment rules from 2016, 2018 and 2022. The principal 2014 Rules were not in the top eight. Full-text search finds words; it does not rank the parent instrument first.

So we opened one of the hits, G.S.R. 363(E) of 20 May 2022, the Companies (Incorporation) Second Amendment Rules, 2022, with lookup_provision. Its preamble is the map:

In exercise of the powers conferred under section 3, section 4, sub-sections (5) and (6) of section 5, section 6, sub-section (1) and (2) of section 7, sub-sections (1) and (2) of section 8, sub-sections (2), (3), (4) and (5) of section 12, sub-sections (3), (4) and proviso to sub-section (5) of section 13, sub-section (2) of section 14, sub-section (1) of section 17, sub-sections (1) and (2) of section 20 read with sub-sections (1) and (2) of section 469 of the Companies Act, 2013 (18 of 2013), the Central Government hereby makes the following rules further to amend the Companies (Incorporation) Rules, 2014

G.S.R. 363(E), Ministry of Corporate Affairs, 20 May 2022, as held on IndiaCode

The rules came into force on 1 June 2022 and substituted Form INC-9, the declaration by subscribers and first directors. For a compliance map, that one preamble gives you twelve rows.

Parent provision (Companies Act, 2013)	Instrument	In force
ss. 3, 4, 5(5), 5(6), 6	G.S.R. 363(E), Incorporation Second Amendment Rules, 2022	1 June 2022
ss. 7(1), 7(2), 8(1), 8(2)	Same instrument	1 June 2022
ss. 12(2) to 12(5), 13(3), 13(4), proviso to 13(5)	Same instrument	1 June 2022
ss. 14(2), 17(1), 20(1), 20(2)	Same instrument	1 June 2022
s. 469(1), 469(2) (general rule-making power)	Same instrument	1 June 2022

Worked example 2: the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988

Motor vehicle rules are split between the Centre and the States, and the Act page shows which instruments India Code supplies, which is not the same as all the rules in force.

The Motor Vehicles Act page has a long run of rule-making sections, some headed “Power of Central Government to make rules” and others “Power of State Government to make rules”. Section 212 sets the common conditions: rules are made after previous publication, published in the Official Gazette and in force from publication unless a later date is set. State rules are laid before the State Legislature. Central rules, and listed notifications, are laid before each House of Parliament for thirty days.

Under “Rules made under this Act”, the page we read on 3 November 2026 listed instruments from 2021 and 2022. They were a mixed bag, which is exactly what a compliance team needs to see:

• Numbered amendment notifications, such as the 20th, G.S.R. 594(E) of 26 August 2021 on BH series registration marks.
• Drafts, such as draft G.S.R. 211(E) of 16 March 2022 on inter-country non-transport vehicles. A draft is published for objections and is not yet law.
• Statutory orders, such as S.O. 859(E) of 25 February 2022 on implementing sections 50 to 57 and 93 of the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019.
• New rules and a scheme: G.S.R. 162(E), the Motor Vehicles (Accident) Fund Rules, 2022, and G.S.R. 163(E), the Compensation to Victims of Hit and Run Motor Accidents Scheme, 2022.

The Central Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989, the principal rules most of those notifications amend, were not on the list. A search of the rules index for that title did bring up older amendment rules, such as the Central Motor Vehicles (1st Amendment) Rules, 2009 and (8th Amendment) Rules, 2015, so read the Act page and the index together and keep a gap column in any map built from one list. Keyword search did not fill it either: “Central Motor Vehicles Amendment Rules” returned 1,125 matches, led by sections 147 and 65 of the Act and State motor vehicle tax Acts.

Worked example 3: a State rent law

For State law, filter by State first: a search restricted to Maharashtra put the Maharashtra Rent Control Rules, 2017 at the top, and their preamble ties them to section 57 of the 1999 Act.

We ran search_statute with “rent control rules” and state: MH on 3 November 2026. It returned 73 matches; the first was the Maharashtra Rent Control Rules, 2017, a title match. The Act’s key is mh/2000/18, because the Maharashtra Rent Control Act, 1999 is Act 18 of 2000 in the State’s numbering. Keys follow the Act number and year, not the year in the short title, which is a good reason to resolve names to keys before you store anything.

The rules’ text carries both the Marathi and the English portions of the Gazette page. The English portion records a Housing Department notification dated 18 November 2017 made “in exercise of the powers conferred by section 57 read with section 37 of the Maharashtra Rent Control Act, 1999 (Mah. XVIII of 2000)”, previously published as section 57(1) requires.

Then the map gets specific. Section 57 lists matters the rules may provide for. Two of them line up with the first rules:

Act provision	What it allows	Rule that uses it
s. 57(2)(c) with s. 31(1)	Form and manner of a rent receipt	Rule 3: a receipt under section 31 shall be in Form I
s. 57(2)(a) with s. 11(2), 11(3)(a)	Manner of adding to rent for improvements	Rule 4: permitted increase not exceeding fifteen per cent per annum of the expenses
s. 57(1)	General power, after previous publication	The whole of the 2017 Rules

A landlord’s compliance checklist built from the Act alone would say “give a receipt”. Built from the rules, it says “give a receipt in Form I”. That gap is the whole argument for mapping subordinate legislation.

Recorded or inferred: how much can you trust a parent link?

Trust a recorded link as a pointer and an inferred link as a lead, and read the preamble in both cases. IndiaCode marks whether the parent Act came from the source’s own record or was worked out from the instrument’s title or text.

Link status	What it means	What to do
Recorded	The source metadata names the parent Act	Follow it, then confirm the enabling section in the preamble
Inferred	Derived from the title, enacting words or other evidence	Read the preamble before relying on it
Unidentified	No parent Act established	Search by number, issuer, date and text; absence is not proof

Text availability is a second, separate signal. Our three examples show all three states: G.S.R. 363(E) has clean English text; the Maharashtra rules carry English text beside the Marathi portion of the Gazette page; and the entry for notification 9/2025-Central Tax (Rate), which supersedes the 2017 GST goods rate notification, is “Recorded by India Code” but holds only the citation, because the document carried no English text the site could publish without guessing. Our post on where India’s income-tax rates come from shows the same pattern in tax law: the rate sits in a Finance Act or a notification, not in the parent Act.

How do you automate the map with the API and MCP?

Use search to find instruments, Get a Section with unit doc to read each one, a preamble parser to extract the parent sections, and the batch endpoint to pull those sections’ text. The request shapes below follow the API docs; the outputs described are from our MCP calls on 3 November 2026, which run on the same endpoints.

# 1. Find instruments (State filter optional; 1 to 50 hits; no text in hits)
curl -s "https://webapi.ecourtsindia.com/api/partner/acts/search?q=rent%20control%20rules&state=MH&limit=10" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ECI_TOKEN"

# 2. Read one instrument: key from the hit, unit doc, number 1
curl -s "https://webapi.ecourtsindia.com/api/partner/acts/sub/5266fe25/sections/1?unit=doc" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ECI_TOKEN"

# 3. Read the parent sections it cites, in one call (1 to 50)
curl -s -X POST "https://webapi.ecourtsindia.com/api/partner/acts/sections/batch" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ECI_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"sections":[{"key":"mh/2000/18","number":"57"},{"key":"mh/2000/18","number":"31"}]}'

The preamble parser does not need to be clever. It needs to be conservative: pull the clause between “conferred by” and “of the … Act”, split on commas and “read with”, and keep anything it cannot parse for a human.

import re

def parent_sections(preamble: str) -> list[str]:
    m = re.search(r"powers conferred (?:by|under)(.+?)of the ([A-Z][^,(]+Act, \d{4})", preamble, re.S)
    if not m:
        return []                       # send to human review
    clause = m.group(1)
    nums = re.findall(r"section\s+(\d+[A-Z]*)", clause)
    return sorted(set(nums), key=lambda n: (int(re.match(r"\d+", n).group()), n))

# For G.S.R. 363(E) this returns sections 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 17, 20, 469.
# Sub-sections ("sub-sections (5) and (6) of section 5") need a second pass.

Billing is simple to model. Search is charged per call, including calls with no hits. Reading an instrument or a section is charged per provision returned, and not-found is free. The batch endpoint charges per distinct section and collapses duplicates. Each costs ₹0.15 on Pay As You Go or ₹0.05 at the Enterprise rate, per the pricing page read on 3 November 2026. Mapping 50 Acts with two searches each, ten instruments each and ten parent sections per instrument comes to 100 + 500 + 5,000 = 5,600 calls, about ₹840 on Pay As You Go or ₹280 at the Enterprise rate, before caching. The free status endpoint gives you a corpus version to cache against.

If you work in Claude or another MCP client, the same three moves are the tools search_statute, lookup_provision and lookup_provisions; our MCP connection guide covers setup, and the statute API guide covers keys, units and caching in depth.

What can RegTech and compliance teams build on this?

An obligations register keyed to sections and instruments, a change feed for new notifications under the Acts you track, and an audit trail that cites G.S.R. numbers instead of web pages.

• Obligations register. One row per obligation, with the Act section, the rule, the form, the instrument number and date, and the link status (recorded or inferred). The Companies Act and rent-law tables above are small versions of it.
• Change feed. Poll search for each tracked Act by name and year, diff the instrument keys against last week’s, and route new ones to a reviewer, with drafts tagged separately.
• Board and audit packs. Cite the Gazette number and date beside the IndiaCode URL, so an auditor can check the source without trusting ours.
• Grounded assistants. A compliance chatbot should answer “which rule prescribes Form INC-9?” by reading the instrument, not recalling it. The legal chatbot grounding guide sets out that pattern.
• Litigation context. When a notice cites a rule, the eCourts API can find orders that construed it, by searching the rule’s name or G.S.R. number in case text.

What this map does not tell you

Sources and method

• IndiaCode rules and notifications index, Companies Act, 2013 page, Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 page and the 09/2025-Central Tax (Rate) entry, read 3 November 2026.
• Statute and instrument text via the eCourtsIndia MCP on 3 November 2026: Companies Act s.469, G.S.R. 363(E), Motor Vehicles Act s.212, Maharashtra Rent Control Act s.57 and the Maharashtra Rent Control Rules, 2017.
• Searches via the eCourtsIndia MCP on 3 November 2026: “Companies (Incorporation) Rules, 2014” (482 matches), “Central Motor Vehicles Amendment Rules” (1,125), “rent control rules” with State MH (73).
• eCourtsIndia API docs and pricing, read 3 November 2026.
• Background: The Law Below India’s Acts and the IndiaCode guide.

Frequently asked questions