About this archive

Union and State Governments publish gazettes regularly on their websites informing citizens of the bills being considered, the laws that are being promulgated and the amendment to these laws. Governments also publish various rules, regulations, bye-laws, and statutory orders in the gazettes. They also contain important notifications like land acquisition, environment classification, town planning etc.

However, gazettes are published in PDFs many of which are scanned and are not easily readable on small devices. Searching across gazette collection is also difficult. Lastly, Indian Gazettes are published in regional laguages that use proprietory non-unicode fonts in the PDFs. They display correctly on the PDFs but when you extract the text, it is gibberish.

We convert all gazettes into HTML format with proper layout detection using our legallayout tool. It correctly recognizes paragraphs, blockquote, tables and images. It extracts images and makes them easily usable in the IIF manifest. We also convert all non-unicode proprietory fonts to unicode, using indic2unicode, making searching of gazettes in regional language possible.

What is here

Currenly featuring 4,52,345 issues across 46 series, from 1929 to 2026. The series index shows exactly what each of the gazette collection contain

How a gazette gets here

Gazettes are downloaded from the government websites along with the metadata like number, part, ministry, department, subject. The PDF is then converted into structured HTML, and it is that HTML which is displayed and indexed. To see how our structured HTML is different from the current PDF to HTML converters, we show the pymupdf rendering of the same PDF as an alternate rendering; the alternate rendering is not indexed, and our structured HTML is the version to read and cite.

Searching

The search box queries the full text of every gazette together with its subject, ministry and department. A hit in the title of an issue outranks matches in the rest of the gazettes. The query language can be:

• "inter cadre transfer" — an exact phrase
• railways OR highways — either term
• acquisition -corrigendum — exclude a term

Citing an issue

Every gazette has a permanent address of the form /details/<identifier>/. That identifier is the same one used for the corresponding item at the Internet Archive, so a citation of either resolves in the other, and it does not change when this site is reorganised. Where one Internet Archive item holds several gazettes, as it does for Goa, the address also names the document within the item: /details/<identifier>/<document>/.