Know Your Rights
A guiding light. Not a guiding hand.
Pilot 12 legal domains 40 official legal documents Runs offline Sovereign stack
Mission
A right you do not know you have is a right you do not have. India's Constitution and its statutes grant its citizens extensive protections — in arrest, in hospital, in tenancy, at work, in the family, and in dealings with banks, sellers and the state. Those protections are written in English, in legal register, across thousands of pages, behind portals that assume literacy, connectivity and confidence.
Know Your Rights closes that distance. A citizen asks a question in their own words, in their own language, by voice or by text. They get back a plain-language answer that names the law it came from — so they can check it, quote it, and act on it.
The Problem
Legal awareness in India is not evenly distributed. It tracks language, income, gender and distance from a metro. The people most likely to need a statutory protection — a tenant facing eviction without notice, a patient handed an inflated hospital bill, a customer whose account was debited by a machine that gave no cash — are the least likely to know that a specific section of a specific Act already speaks to their situation.
The existing routes assume too much:
- Lawyers cost money that the people most exposed do not have.
- Government portals are English-first, form-heavy, and assume a stable connection.
- General-purpose chatbots will answer confidently and cite nothing — the worst possible failure mode for a legal question, because a wrong answer is indistinguishable from a right one.
- Search returns commentary, blogspam and outdated sections, not the statute.
The gap is not a shortage of law. It is a shortage of access to law in a form a citizen can use.
What It Does
| Capability | What the citizen gets |
|---|---|
| Ask in your own language | Questions in English, Hindi or Gujarati, answered in the same language they were asked in |
| Ask by voice | Speak the question instead of typing it — for users who read slowly or not at all |
| Every answer cites its source | The Act, the section, and a link to the official document. Nothing is asserted without a citation |
| Says when it does not know | Where no provision matches, the platform says so plainly rather than inventing one |
| Next steps, not verdicts | Which authority, what to put in writing, and what evidence to keep |
| Emergency numbers offline | Verified helplines stored on the device, reachable with no network and no balance |
| Works without connectivity | The app opens, and the emergency screen works, with no connection at all |
Coverage
Twelve legal domains, grounded in forty official legal documents sourced from government publications — never from secondary commentary, and never written from memory.
| Domain | What a citizen can ask about |
|---|---|
| Criminal law & procedure | Arrest, the grounds that must be given, custody, bail, filing an FIR |
| Fundamental rights | Equality, liberty, the freedoms, and constitutional remedies |
| Road & traffic | Licensing, penalties, what to do after an accident, seizure of documents |
| Healthcare | Emergency treatment, hospital billing, medical records, mental healthcare rights |
| Property & tenancy | Eviction and notice, landlord and tenant obligations, registration, homebuyer protections |
| Consumer | Refunds, defective goods, deficient services, where and how to complain |
| Banking | Failed and unauthorised transactions, disputed charges, escalation routes |
| Identity & entitlements | Aadhaar, ration entitlements, electoral roll, passport |
| Employment | Unpaid wages, dismissal and retrenchment, sexual harassment at work and the complaint route |
| Family | Domestic violence and protection orders, dowry, maintenance and the rights of parents and senior citizens |
| Social justice | Caste atrocities, disability rights and non-discrimination in employment, transgender rights and identity documents |
| Education | Admission under the right to education, capitation fees, denial of admission |
A grievance-and-redress layer sits across every domain, so the procedural route — how to ask in writing, how to escalate, how to obtain free legal aid — remains reachable from any question.
Sovereign by design
The platform runs entirely on infrastructure under Indian control. No citizen's legal question is sent to a foreign API, and none needs to be. This is a deliberate constraint, not a limitation to be engineered away later: a person asking whether the police may search their home should not have that question leave the country.
Questions are ephemeral. Voice is never stored server-side.
Built to refuse
The hardest engineering problem here is not answering. It is declining to answer. A confident, fluent, wrong answer to a legal question is worse than no answer, because the citizen cannot tell the difference and may act on it.
The platform is therefore built to say "no matching law was found" and mean it — and that refusal is styled distinctly so it is never mistaken for guidance.
Interface
Mobile-first, high contrast, large touch targets. Designed to be read outdoors, on a small screen, under stress.
The interface is built for a user who may be reading slowly, in poor light, on a cheap phone, in a bad moment. Every answer carries its citation and its disclaimer. The emergency numbers are one tap from every screen and work with no signal.
Who It Is For
- Citizens in tier-2 and tier-3 cities and rural districts, where legal help is distant and expensive
- Women facing questions they may not be able to ask aloud to anyone nearby
- Marginalised and low-income communities, for whom the cost of not knowing a right is highest
- Non-English speakers, who are excluded by default from statutory text and government portals alike
- Users with low literacy, served by voice input and plain-language output
- Frontline workers, paralegals and NGOs, as a fast reference when advising others
- Tenants, workers and carers — the situations the corpus covers most deeply are the everyday ones: eviction, unpaid wages, a hospital bill, a bank debit that took money and gave nothing
Status — Pilot
The platform is built and functioning end to end: a working progressive web app, multilingual retrieval across all eight domains, voice input, offline emergency access, and citation on every answer.
It has not been released for public use. Before it is, three things must happen:
- Legal domain validation. Practising lawyers and legal-aid organisations reviewing answer quality domain by domain. This is the gate, and it is not one an engineering team can clear on its own.
- Corpus review. The corpus has grown to cover employment, family, disability, senior-citizen, caste-atrocity, transgender and education rights alongside the original domains — but coverage is uneven, and what is still missing is documented rather than hidden. See the limitations below.
- Controlled user testing with the communities the platform is built for, in their own languages.
What It Cannot Do Yet
A platform that tells citizens what the law says has to be candid about where it stops. These are the limits as they stand, not aspirations.
| Limitation | What it means for a citizen |
|---|---|
| Three languages, not twenty-two | English, Hindi and Gujarati are live. A speaker of any other scheduled language cannot use it yet. |
| Answers are strongest in English | Hindi and Gujarati answers cite the law correctly but are less consistently specific about the next step to take. This is the single largest quality gap and is being worked on. |
| State coverage is Gujarat only | Rent control and state health schemes are Gujarat's. A citizen elsewhere gets the central position, and the answer says so — but their own state's rules may differ and are not held here. |
| Central law, not state rules | Labour law in particular is enacted centrally and implemented through state rules that differ. Employment answers say this explicitly rather than implying a single national position. |
| Gaps that are known and recorded | Several bodies of law and several welfare schemes could not be sourced from an official document and are deliberately absent rather than guessed at. Among them: most state welfare schemes outside Gujarat, and general hospital-admission procedure. |
| Only verified helplines are shown | Ten numbers, each checked against an official source. Numbers that could not be verified are omitted, not approximated — a wrong helpline costs someone time they do not have. |
| Not a lawyer | It reports what a provision says and what the procedure is. It does not assess a situation, predict an outcome, or tell anyone what to do. |
Partner With Us
This is public-interest infrastructure. It is more useful in the hands of institutions that already reach the people it is built for than as a standalone app.
We are seeking:
- Legal aid organisations and practising advocates to validate answer quality and flag what is missing
- Government and public-sector partners for pilot deployment and authoritative scheme data
- NGOs and community organisations for field testing in the languages and districts they serve
- Language partners to extend coverage beyond the three languages live today
A Note on Method
The retrieval architecture, evaluation methodology and answer-governance layer behind this platform are proprietary and are not disclosed pending intellectual property protection. This page describes what the platform does and who it serves; it does not describe how it is built.
Research partners and institutional collaborators can request a technical briefing under confidentiality.