NYAYA

Indian legal AI — grounded, cited, refusal-gated for the citizen.

POC

The need it answers

Most Indians can't afford a lawyer for a simple question — and the law sits in dense English no ordinary citizen can parse. NYAYA gives every citizen a grounded, plain-language answer to 'what does the law actually say about my situation?' — cited, honest about its limits, and never a substitute for a real lawyer.

What it is

NYAYA is a citizen-facing guide to Indian law: plain-language answers to questions about rights and procedure, always grounded in a cited provision with a disclaimer. It retrieves relevant law, passes a two-tier confidence gate, then answers — and refuses when unsure. It is IPC→BNS aware (the 2024 overhaul). Part of platform DHARMA.

By the numbersWhy a grounded legal answer matters now

India carries 4.76 crore pending cases with just 21 judges per million — under half the recommended 50. NYAYA does not replace a court or a lawyer; it gives any citizen a grounded, cited, plain-language answer in seconds, free — before a dispute ever needs one.

0 cr

cases pending

NJDG, Dec 2025

judges per million

vs 50 benchmark

cases / district judge

India Justice Report

registered lawyers

unevenly distributed

India today 21 judges/M

Law Commission benchmark 50 judges/M

Dimension	⚖ System today	With NYAYA	Shift
Cost of a basic answeraffordability	lawyer fee	free	access
Time to an answerspeed	days–weeks	seconds	huge
Groundingtrust	varies	cited + refusal gate	honest
Σ Reachwho it serves	21 judges/M, uneven	any citizen, any language	universal

Public-record figures, validated 2026-06-10. NYAYA augments legal understanding — it is not legal advice and not a substitute for a lawyer.

Sources: NJDG — pending cases India Justice Report 2025

The evolutionHow it was distilled — and what shaped it

🌱 Seed

A free legal guide for the ordinary citizen (B2C).

← shaped by the access-to-justice gap — lawyers are unaffordable for everyday questions.

🛤 Path

Built the v0.1 spike — TF-IDF retrieve → two-tier refusal gate → grounded answer + citation + disclaimer; IPC→BNS aware.

← shaped by the rule that a legal answer must be grounded, must cite, and must refuse when unsure.

🔀 Pivot

From a legal chatbot to grounded retrieval with a refusal gate — the moat is honesty, not fluency.

← shaped by the danger of hallucinated law — better to refuse than to guess.

💎 Crystal

NYAYA (B2C citizen guide) + ARTHA (B2B compliance) under the DHARMA platform; India Code ingestion verified.

← shaped by the Purushartha pairing — Nyaya (justice) with Artha (means).

⭐ Principle

Every citizen gets a grounded, cited, plain-language answer — neutral, safe, and aware of when to escalate to a human.

← shaped by justice as a public good and safety-first design.

Where we stand todayBuilt & working

✓Agent verified: retrieve → confidence gate → cited answer
✓Refusal gate rejects low-confidence / out-of-domain queries
✓Seed corpus with IPC→BNS mapping
✓Web Q&A interface running locally
✓Embeddings + corpus scale-up scaffolding ready

What's nextOn the path

→Deploy to a live subdomain
→Scale the corpus from public bare acts (India Code)
→Stage-0 intake — capture incident date for date-aware answers
→Layer in case law (open judgment datasets)

★ the moonshot

One platform that collapses the gap between the law as written and the law as understood — across every domain a citizen meets, from traffic to consumer to criminal.