TL;DR: On 2 January 2023, CJI D Y Chandrachud launched e-SCR, which put roughly 34,000 reportable Supreme Court judgments online at no cost. Six months later, on 6 July 2023, the Supreme Court implemented a neutral citation system so every judgment carries a stable, court-assigned identifier like 2023 INSC 1. Delhi and Kerala had already piloted neutral citations for their High Court judgments since October and November 2022 respectively. Together, these two reforms mean authoritative Indian case law is now findable, free, and uniformly citable for the first time in the court’s history.
On this page
- What the e-SCR project is
- How we got here: the paid-database era
- The SCR portal: what you can search today
- Vernacular translations: judgments in your language
- What a neutral citation is and why it matters
- How to read an INSC citation
- The committee that standardised the system
- High Courts that have adopted neutral citations
- Neutral citation vs reporter citation: a comparison
- How to cite correctly in pleadings and written submissions
- What this means for students, juniors, and solo practitioners
- What this means for AI legal tools
- Frequently asked questions
- Niyam and primary sources
What the e-SCR project is
The Electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) is the digital, freely accessible version of the official law reporter of the Supreme Court of India. On 2 January 2023, then Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud announced its launch and made roughly 34,000 reportable judgments available to anyone with an internet connection, at no cost.
The phrase “reportable judgment” is worth pausing on. Not every order or judgment the Supreme Court pronounces is formally reported. Reportable judgments are those the court itself designates as significant enough to appear in the official Supreme Court Reports (SCR), the government-published series that has existed since the court was constituted in 1950. Before e-SCR, accessing the SCR in its digital form was either through physical volumes in a law library or through a commercial legal database. The e-SCR project changed that by putting the official text, with headnotes, online and searchable.
The judgments are available through three channels:
- The Supreme Court’s own website at sci.gov.in
- The Supreme Court’s mobile application
- The judgment portal of the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) at judgments.ecourts.gov.in
The CJI noted at the launch that young juniors would no longer need to pay for access and that the elastic search facility over the full text makes it possible to search across all 34,000 judgments without knowing a specific citation in advance.
How we got here: the paid-database era
To understand why e-SCR matters, it helps to understand what access looked like before it.
The Supreme Court Reports is the official publication, but it has always been published in physical volumes. Keeping up with those volumes, having them indexed and searchable, and accessing older volumes required either a well-stocked law library or a paid digital subscription. The major commercial databases that filled this gap are comprehensive and professionally maintained, but their subscription costs put them out of reach for many students and independent practitioners. A full set of print reporters and a digital research subscription together run to a substantial annual outlay.
For an established firm or a court-attached library, those costs are manageable. For a law student, a first-year junior, or a lawyer practising independently in a tier-2 or tier-3 city, the numbers look different. The practical result was that reliable, head-noted access to the court’s own judgments was, for a large portion of the profession, behind a paywall.
The workaround most people used was a free public search engine that indexes court judgments. These free engines are genuinely useful and widely used, but they do not carry the headnotes that appear in the official reporter, and their citation format is not court-authorised. They also do not distinguish between reportable and non-reportable judgments in the same way the official SCR does. For quick research they work well, but for a verified, head-noted, officially citable text, lawyers still needed a paid subscription or a physical library.
e-SCR removed that dependency for the Supreme Court’s reportable judgments.
| Source | Cost | Headnotes | Official reporter | Search capability |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| e-SCR / SCR portal (scr.sci.gov.in) | Free | Yes | Yes | Elastic full-text |
| Free public search engines | Free | No | No | Full-text |
| Commercial subscription databases | Paid subscription | Yes | Yes (reporter series) | Advanced |
| Print reporter series (digital) | Paid subscription | Yes | Yes | Varies |
The SCR portal: what you can search today
Since the original e-SCR launch in January 2023, the infrastructure has been consolidated. On 7 May 2025, Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna launched the unified SCR portal at scr.sci.gov.in, formed by merging the earlier e-SCR and DigiSCR portals into a single interface. The portal is the official law reporter of the Supreme Court and is accessible free of cost.
The search facility on the SCR portal allows:
- Free-text search across the full text of judgments
- Search within search (narrowing results progressively)
- Case type and case year filters
- Judge name search
- Year and volume search
- Bench strength filter (for example, finding all five-judge Constitution Bench judgments)
Headnotes on the portal are structured into categories: issues for consideration, case laws cited within the judgment, list of acts and statutes referred to, a list of keywords, the tribunal or court the matter arose from, appearances of counsel, and the judgment or order itself.
New judgments are uploaded within 24 hours of pronouncement. The portal is built on elastic search technology developed with the National Informatics Centre, which means searches return relevance-ranked results rather than a simple date-sorted list.
If you are looking for a specific judgment and already have either a neutral citation or a case name, the portal will resolve it directly. If you are researching a legal principle without a specific case in mind, the full-text search across 34,000+ head-noted judgments is a more reliable starting point than a general web search. For research that spans both the Supreme Court and the High Courts in a single query, our AI legal research assistant searches across a larger judgment corpus and returns the underlying cases with their citations.
Vernacular translations: judgments in your language
One of the less-publicised dimensions of the e-SCR initiative is the translation of Supreme Court judgments into Indian languages.
As of 28 March 2025, 36,344 Supreme Court judgments had been translated into Hindi and 47,439 judgments had been translated into other vernacular languages and uploaded on the e-SCR portal, according to the Ministry of Law and Justice. The translation work is being carried out in collaboration with the High Courts across the country.
The languages covered include Hindi, Punjabi, Kannada, Tamil, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Malayalam, Odia, Bengali, Nepali, Urdu, Assamese, and others, covering 18 vernacular languages in total.
The mechanism behind this is AI-assisted translation. CJI Chandrachud constituted the AI Assisted Legal Translation Advisory Committee, headed by Justice Abhay S. Oka of the Supreme Court, to oversee the translation of e-SCR judgments into vernacular languages using AI tools. Since February 2023, AI has been used to transcribe oral arguments in Constitution Bench matters and to translate key Supreme Court and High Court judgments.
The Bar Council of India has also constituted the Bharatiya Bhasha Samiti, chaired by a former Chief Justice of India, which is developing a common core vocabulary for translating legal material into regional languages. This work addresses one of the practical challenges in legal translation: the same legal term can be rendered differently by different translators, creating confusion across translated texts.
For practitioners whose clients speak primarily in a regional language, the translated judgments are a meaningful resource. For legal education in state law schools where instruction is in the regional medium, having authoritative translated judgments on the official portal closes a long-standing gap.
What a neutral citation is and why it matters
A neutral citation is a court-assigned identifier for a judgment that does not depend on any commercial publisher, reporter series, or database.
Before neutral citations, if you wanted to cite a Supreme Court judgment, you typically referred to it by its appearance in a print reporter. The same judgment might be cited as (2019) 5 SCC 1 in the Supreme Court Cases series, as AIR 2019 SC 100 in the All India Reporter, and as 2019 SCR (3) 500 in the Supreme Court Reports. Three lawyers researching the same case, using different databases, would produce three different citations in their written submissions. Courts across the country would receive briefs citing cases in different formats, making cross-verification time-consuming.
A neutral citation solves this by giving the judgment one stable reference that was assigned at the moment of decision by the court itself. That reference does not change when the case appears in a particular volume, when the volume numbering shifts, or when a database restructures its identifiers.
The Supreme Court implemented its neutral citation system in a phased manner with effect from 6 July 2023, following a notice issued that date. Phase I covered judgments pronounced between 1 January 2014 and 5 July 2023, and all judgments from 6 July 2023 onwards. A subsequent circular of 27 September 2023 announced Phase II, which extended the system to orders in addition to judgments.
Every judgment now carries its neutral citation and a QR code on the top left corner of the first page. Scanning the QR code takes you directly to the official text on the Supreme Court’s system.
How to read an INSC citation
The Supreme Court’s neutral citation format is straightforward:
2024 INSC 113
The three elements are:
- Year (2024): the calendar year in which the judgment was pronounced.
- INSC: the abbreviation for “India Supreme Court.”
- Sequential number (113): the seriatim number of that judgment or order within that calendar year, assigned in the order judgments are delivered.
There is no volume number, no reporter abbreviation, and no page reference. The citation uniquely identifies the judgment regardless of where you access the full text.
The format is sometimes written without spaces (2024INSC113) and sometimes with them (2024 INSC 113). The Supreme Court’s official notice uses the spaced version. Either form is understood to refer to the same judgment.
A few practical points:
- The sequential number resets to 1 at the start of each calendar year.
- The citation is assigned by the Registry, not by a commercial publisher.
- If a case was decided before the neutral citation system was implemented, it may carry a retroactively assigned neutral citation (Phase I covered judgments back to 1 January 2014).
- Judgments delivered before 1 January 2014 do not yet carry neutral citations.
The committee that standardised the system
The neutral citation system did not appear overnight. Its development was deliberate and committee-driven.
Justice D Y Chandrachud, as Chairperson of the Supreme Court’s e-Committee, constituted a three-judge panel to develop a framework for uniform neutral citations across the Supreme Court and the High Courts. The committee comprised:
- Justice Rajiv Shakdher, Delhi High Court
- Justice Raja Vijayaraghavan, Kerala High Court
- Justice Suraj Govindraj, Karnataka High Court
The committee’s mandate was to develop a standard national model for generating and allocating neutral citations. Delhi and Kerala were already running their own neutral citation pilots when the committee was formed, which is why judges from those courts were natural members. The committee’s work fed into the February 2023 press note announcing the forthcoming system, and the formal implementation followed on 6 July 2023.
The selection of the INSC format reflects the committee’s emphasis on court-agnostic identifiers. Each court in the system would have its own abbreviation; the format would otherwise be identical across courts.
High Courts that have adopted neutral citations
Delhi was the first High Court in India to introduce a neutral citation system. Its circular of October 2022 introduced the format with effect from 17 October 2022. Every judgment uploaded on the Delhi High Court’s website from that date carries a neutral citation in the form:
2022/DHC/005765
The format uses the year, the court abbreviation DHC (Delhi High Court), and a system-generated sequential number.
Kerala followed within weeks, implementing its own unique neutral citation number scheme from 1 November 2022 for all judgments and interim orders marked CR since 1949.
Madras implemented its neutral citation system from 1 January 2023, with a unique citation auto-generated for every order and judgment uploaded to the court’s official website.
Allahabad has adopted the system as well: judgments on its eLegalix portal now carry neutral citations in the format 2024:AHC:135964, where AHC denotes the Allahabad High Court.
The Bombay High Court’s eCourts portal shows neutral citation search capability for its judgments. The High Court of Meghalaya, the High Court of Sikkim, and other smaller High Courts have published pages on their official sites dedicated to neutral citation.
The e-Committee of the Supreme Court has worked with all High Courts to ensure the system spreads nationally. Similar committees have been constituted in each High Court, headed by a judge of that court, to oversee implementation.
| High Court | Neutral citation format | Adopted |
|---|---|---|
| Delhi | 2022/DHC/[number] | October 2022 |
| Kerala | Year/KHC/[number] | November 2022 |
| Madras | Year/MHC/[number] | January 2023 |
| Allahabad | Year:AHC:[number] | 2023 |
| Bombay | Available via eCourts portal | 2023 onwards |
| Meghalaya | Year/JKMHC/[number] (example format) | 2023 |
| Supreme Court | Year INSC [number] | July 2023 |
Note: Exact format abbreviations for some courts should be confirmed on the respective court’s official portal, as minor variations exist.
Neutral citation vs reporter citation: a comparison
Understanding the difference between a neutral citation and a reporter citation is useful both for citing correctly and for understanding what you are reading when you see different types of references.
| Feature | Neutral citation (e.g., 2024 INSC 113) | Reporter citation (e.g., (2024) 5 SCC 100) |
|---|---|---|
| Assigned by | The court itself | Commercial publisher or official reporter |
| Timing | At the moment of decision | When the reporter volume is published (weeks to months later) |
| Uniqueness | One citation per judgment | Multiple citations if the case appears in several reporters |
| Publisher dependency | None | Yes |
| Changes over time | Never | Volume numbering can shift in revised editions |
| Availability | Immediately on court website | Only after volume publication |
| QR code linkage | Yes (Supreme Court) | No |
| Pre-2014 coverage (SC) | Not yet assigned | Exists in print reporters |
| Online resolution | Directly on sci.gov.in or scr.sci.gov.in | Via relevant database subscription |
Reporter citations are not going away. The SCC, AIR, and SCR series carry editorial analysis, headnotes written by experienced legal editors, and the full apparatus of professional reporting that has made them valuable for decades. Many judges and practitioners still cite by SCC or AIR, and courts accept those citations. The neutral citation sits alongside reporter citations as an additional, more immediate reference.
The practical convention that is emerging: cite the neutral citation and add the reporter citation as a parallel citation. This gives your reader both the immediately resolvable court-assigned reference and the richer editorially annotated version.
For example: State of Maharashtra v. Vikram Lakhmichand Sharma, 2024 INSC 113 = (2024) 5 SCC [relevant page].
When only one citation is possible (because you do not have a database subscription that shows the SCC citation), the neutral citation alone is complete and court-accepted.
How to cite correctly in pleadings and written submissions
The Supreme Court’s notice of 6 July 2023 formalised the use of neutral citations. Courts are familiar with the format and accept it. Here is how to apply it in practice.
For Supreme Court judgments:
Use the format Year INSC [number]. For instance, XYZ v. Union of India, 2024 INSC 341. You do not need to add the volume or page from a reporter if you do not have access to one. If you do have a reporter citation, add it after: 2024 INSC 341 = (2024) 6 SCC 200.
For Delhi High Court judgments:
Use the format Year/DHC/[number], for instance: ABC v. Registrar of Companies, 2023/DHC/004512.
For Allahabad High Court judgments:
Use the format Year:AHC:[number], for instance: 2024:AHC:135964.
For other High Courts:
Check the official website of the relevant court. Most courts now have a dedicated neutral citation page explaining their format.
For judgments pre-dating the neutral citation system:
For Supreme Court judgments before January 2014, neutral citations have not yet been retroactively assigned. Use the reporter citation (SCC, AIR, SCR) as the primary reference.
For Supreme Court judgments from January 2014 to July 2023, neutral citations were assigned retrospectively under Phase I. You can look these up on scr.sci.gov.in or the Supreme Court website.
Format in written submissions:
The citation typically appears in the first line of a case reference block, followed by the court, bench, and date:
[Case name], Year INSC [number]
[Full court name], [Bench composition], [Date of judgment]If opposing counsel or the other side cites a case by reporter citation alone, you can convert it to a neutral citation using the SCR portal’s search, or check the citation and its current status to confirm the case is still good law before you rely on it.
A note on QR codes:
All Supreme Court judgments from 6 July 2023 now carry a QR code on the first page that links directly to the official text. When attaching a copy of a judgment as an annexure, that QR code gives the court a direct line back to the source, independent of any database.
What this means for students, juniors, and solo practitioners
The combined effect of e-SCR and neutral citations is a shift in who can participate fully in Indian legal research.
Before these reforms, the practical hierarchy looked like this: lawyers at large firms had access to comprehensive subscriptions, lawyers at smaller firms and individual practitioners might have one database, and law students had whatever their institution provided, which in many smaller law schools was limited. The result was that the quality of citation available to a lawyer correlated with the institutional resources behind them.
The reforms change this in specific ways.
For law students: The e-SCR portal gives access to the same 34,000 head-noted judgments that a senior counsel at a large firm can access through an expensive commercial subscription. The quality of the text, the headnotes, and the official reportability are the same. The only thing missing is the editorial commentary and cross-referencing that commercial databases add. For checking a proposition against the primary source, e-SCR is fully adequate.
For junior lawyers: The neutral citation means you can produce a fully citable, court-accepted reference from a publicly available source. You do not need a subscription to verify that you have the right case. The QR code on the judgment is your verification.
For solo practitioners in smaller towns: The SCR portal is accessible on a mobile phone. The Supreme Court’s mobile application also provides access. A practitioner anywhere in India with a data connection can now access the official text of a reportable Supreme Court judgment and cite it correctly in a pleading.
For legal aid providers: Organisations providing free legal services, paralegal training programmes, and legal literacy initiatives can build curricula and reference materials directly from official, verifiable primary sources without incurring database costs.
For related guidance on how to read and use an Indian judgment once you have found it, see our post on how to read and brief an Indian judgment. For understanding how to verify whether a case you have found is still good law, the good law checking guide covers the practical steps.
What this means for AI legal tools
Neutral citations and free official access to primary law also matter significantly for how AI tools in the legal domain can and should operate.
The problem that neutral citations solve for humans, they also solve for software: a single stable identifier that resolves to an authoritative official text. When an AI system references a Supreme Court judgment, the question you should always be able to ask is: does the answer trace back to a real, verifiable judgment? If the system gives you a case name and SCC citation but you cannot resolve it to the official text without a subscription, you cannot verify the answer efficiently.
With neutral citations, that problem is reduced. A reference to 2024 INSC 113 can be checked on scr.sci.gov.in by anyone, immediately. If an AI tool gives you a neutral citation that does not exist when you check the portal, that is a clear hallucination signal. If the citation exists and the text matches what the tool told you, you have a verified primary source.
For an AI tool to cite a judgment with a neutral citation that resolves correctly on the official portal, the tool needs to have been trained on or have access to the actual text of Indian judgments. Tools that generate citations without grounding in real judgments will produce fake neutral citations as readily as they produce fake reporter citations. The difference is that neutral citations are much easier and cheaper to verify.
This is directly relevant to the question of AI hallucination in legal research. For a fuller discussion of how to detect and avoid fabricated citations in AI-assisted research, see our post on AI legal research in India and avoiding hallucinations.
Niyam operates on a corpus of 72,000+ Indian judgments. When Niyam generates an answer about Indian law, the answer is grounded in that corpus, and citations it produces link back to real judgments. The existence of a stable, free, verifiable public reference system through neutral citations and the SCR portal means users can independently check those citations without needing any additional database. That closed loop, from AI answer to neutral citation to official text, is what responsible AI-assisted legal research looks like.
You might also find useful our post on the High Courts and Article 226 writ jurisdiction, which cites judgments using the format this post describes, and our explanation of the new criminal laws and what changed under the BNS, BNSS, and BSA.
Frequently asked questions
What is e-SCR?
e-SCR stands for Electronic Supreme Court Reports. It is the digital, freely accessible version of the official law reporter of the Supreme Court of India, launched on 2 January 2023 by then Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud. It provides free online access to reportable Supreme Court judgments, complete with headnotes, at scr.sci.gov.in.
How many judgments does e-SCR contain?
At launch, e-SCR contained roughly 34,000 reportable Supreme Court judgments. The collection grows continuously, as new judgments are uploaded within 24 hours of being pronounced. The SCR portal, formed by merging e-SCR and DigiSCR in May 2025, is an up-to-date repository of all reportable judgments.
What is the difference between e-SCR and a free case-law search engine?
A free public search engine indexes a large number of court judgments but does not provide official headnotes and does not distinguish formally between reportable and non-reportable judgments. e-SCR (now accessible through the SCR portal) provides the official reported text with headnotes as they appear in the Supreme Court Reports, which is the court’s own official publication. The two serve complementary purposes: a free search engine is useful for broad discovery, e-SCR provides the authoritative, head-noted official text.
What is a neutral citation in Indian law?
A neutral citation is a court-assigned identifier for a judgment, independent of any commercial publisher. The Supreme Court’s neutral citation format is Year INSC [number], for example 2024 INSC 113. It is assigned at the moment of decision and never changes, unlike reporter citations that depend on which volume a case appears in.
What does INSC stand for in a neutral citation?
INSC stands for “India Supreme Court.” It is the abbreviation the Supreme Court of India uses in its neutral citation format to identify the court that issued the judgment.
When did the Supreme Court implement neutral citations?
The Supreme Court implemented its neutral citation system with effect from 6 July 2023, via a notice issued on that date. The implementation was phased: Phase I covered judgments from 1 January 2014 to 5 July 2023 and all judgments from 6 July 2023 onwards. Phase II, announced on 27 September 2023, extended the system to include orders in addition to judgments.
Which High Courts have adopted neutral citations?
Delhi was the first, implementing neutral citations from 17 October 2022. Kerala followed from 1 November 2022. Madras implemented the system from 1 January 2023. Allahabad, Bombay, Meghalaya, Sikkim, and other High Courts have also adopted neutral citation formats. The e-Committee of the Supreme Court has worked with all High Courts to roll out the system nationally.
What is Delhi High Court’s neutral citation format?
Delhi High Court uses the format Year/DHC/[system-generated number], for example 2022/DHC/005765. Every judgment uploaded on the Delhi High Court’s official website from October 2022 onwards carries this citation on the first page.
How do I convert a reporter citation to a neutral citation?
Use the search facility on the SCR portal at scr.sci.gov.in or the Supreme Court’s website at sci.gov.in. You can search by case name, year, or other identifiers. The neutral citation is shown alongside the judgment text. For High Court judgments, check the official portal of the relevant High Court.
Can I use a neutral citation alone in court pleadings?
Yes. The Supreme Court’s notice of 6 July 2023 formalised the neutral citation system, and courts accept it as a complete, authoritative reference. If you also have a reporter citation, add it as a parallel citation for the convenience of the court and opposing counsel. The format for a parallel citation is: Case Name, 2024 INSC 113 = (2024) 5 SCC [page].
What is a “reportable” judgment?
A reportable judgment is one that the Supreme Court designates as significant enough to be formally reported in the official Supreme Court Reports. Not every order or judgment the court delivers is reportable. Reportable judgments typically involve the court deciding a substantive point of law, interpreting a statute, or laying down a precedent. Non-reportable judgments resolve the particular dispute without setting a general proposition.
How is the SCR portal different from the e-SCR that launched in 2023?
The SCR portal at scr.sci.gov.in is the evolved, unified platform that merged the earlier e-SCR portal and the DigiSCR portal. It was launched by Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna on 7 May 2025. The SCR portal is the current official repository of all reportable Supreme Court judgments and supersedes both predecessor portals.
Are Supreme Court judgments available in regional languages?
Yes. As of 28 March 2025, 36,344 Supreme Court judgments have been translated into Hindi and 47,439 judgments have been translated into other vernacular languages, all uploaded on the e-SCR portal. The initiative covers 18 languages including Kannada, Tamil, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Malayalam, Odia, Bengali, Nepali, Urdu, Assamese, Punjabi, and others. Translation is done with AI assistance, overseen by the AI Assisted Legal Translation Advisory Committee headed by Justice Abhay S. Oka.
Who established the committee that standardised neutral citations?
The committee was constituted by Justice D Y Chandrachud in his capacity as Chairperson of the Supreme Court’s e-Committee. The three-member panel comprised Justice Rajiv Shakdher of the Delhi High Court, Justice Raja Vijayaraghavan of the Kerala High Court, and Justice Suraj Govindraj of the Karnataka High Court. Their mandate was to develop a standard national model for neutral citations across the Supreme Court and all High Courts.
What is the difference between a neutral citation and an SCC citation?
An SCC citation (for example, (2024) 5 SCC 100) tells you that the judgment appears in Volume 5 of the Supreme Court Cases series for 2024, at page 100. It is assigned by Eastern Book Company, the publisher of SCC, after the volume is compiled. A neutral citation (for example, 2024 INSC 113) is assigned by the Supreme Court itself at the moment of decision. The two citations may refer to the same judgment, and both are valid, but the neutral citation is immediately available and publisher-independent.
Do judgments from before 2014 have neutral citations?
Not yet. Phase I of the Supreme Court’s neutral citation system covers judgments from 1 January 2014 onwards. Judgments before 2014 do not currently have retrospectively assigned neutral citations at the Supreme Court level, though they continue to be accessible through reporter citations and through the SCR portal’s searchable text.
How does a QR code relate to a neutral citation?
From 6 July 2023, every Supreme Court judgment carries both its neutral citation and a QR code on the top left corner of its first page. The QR code links directly to the official text of that judgment on the Supreme Court’s system. The QR code functions as a machine-readable version of the same reference, enabling immediate electronic verification without manual searching.
Does access to e-SCR require registration or login?
No. The SCR portal at scr.sci.gov.in and the NJDG judgment portal are accessible to anyone without registration or a paid account. The Supreme Court’s mobile application also provides free access without requiring an account for judgment searches.
How does the neutral citation system help detect AI hallucinations in legal research?
A fabricated neutral citation can be checked instantly and for free on the SCR portal. If you search for a neutral citation an AI tool provided and it does not appear, that is direct evidence of a hallucinated reference. Reporter citations (SCC, AIR) are harder to verify without a subscription, so neutral citations create a faster verification loop for anyone using AI for legal research.
What is the format for Allahabad High Court neutral citations?
Allahabad High Court neutral citations follow the format Year:AHC:[number], for example 2024:AHC:135964. These can be searched on the court’s eLegalix judgment information system at elegalix.allahabadhighcourt.in.
If I find a case on a free search engine, how do I get the neutral citation?
A free search engine shows the court’s own citation when it appears in the judgment text. If the judgment is from 6 July 2023 onwards, the neutral citation will appear on the first page of the judgment. You can also search for the case by name or year on scr.sci.gov.in to find the official text with the neutral citation. For High Court judgments, use the relevant High Court’s official judgment portal.
Niyam and primary sources
Niyam grounds every answer in citable Indian law. The corpus covers 72,000+ Indian judgments, and when Niyam answers a question about a statutory provision or a legal doctrine, it tells you which judgment the answer comes from. With neutral citations now making primary sources freely verifiable, you can take any citation Niyam provides and check it directly on the SCR portal or the relevant High Court’s portal, at no cost. If you have questions about Indian legal research or want to understand how Niyam works, reach us at [email protected] or try the research assistant at app.niyam.ai.