README.md

metadata

license: cc-by-4.0
language:
  - en
task_categories:
  - text-retrieval
  - text-classification
tags:
  - legal
  - law
  - india
  - indian-penal-code
  - statute-identification
  - retrieval
pretty_name: Indian IPC Statute Identification
size_categories:
  - 10K<n<100K
configs:
  - config_name: default
    data_files: data/*.parquet

Indian IPC Statute Identification

Given the facts of an Indian court case, identify the relevant Indian Penal Code (IPC) section. Each example pairs the factual narrative of a High Court judgment with the text of an IPC section that the judgment applies.

The task is framed as retrieval / statute identification: from a fact scenario, retrieve (or classify) the governing statute. It is a useful benchmark and training signal for legal information retrieval, legal text classification, and domain adaptation of text embedding models to Indian criminal law.

Contents

column	description
case_facts	The factual narrative from an Indian High Court judgment. Explicit references to the governing section (e.g. "Section 302 IPC", "u/s 420") are masked as [STATUTE] so the example is a genuine facts→statute task and cannot be solved by string-matching the section number.
ipc_section	The relevant IPC section number (e.g. 302, 304B, 498A).
statute_text	The full operative text of that IPC section — the offence definition and punishment (the "Whoever… shall be punished…" statutory language).

• 40,001 examples · ~14,900 distinct cases · 320 distinct IPC sections.
• A case charged under multiple sections appears as multiple rows (one per relevant section).
• The section distribution reflects real criminal litigation — the most frequent sections are the common offences (murder §302, culpable homicide §304, hurt §323/§325, theft §379, cheating §420, cruelty §498A, rioting §147, …).

How it was built

1. Judgments: factual narratives are drawn from Indian High Court judgments.
2. Statute mapping: each judgment's own citations to IPC sections are extracted (e.g. "under Section 302 IPC", "u/s 420") — a factual reference contained in the public record of the judgment. Those citations are then masked in case_facts so the model must infer the statute from the facts rather than read it off.
3. Statute text: the statute_text for each section is the corresponding IPC provision (offence + punishment).

Sources & licensing

• Court judgments are Indian High Court decisions, redistributed here in reformatted, excerpted form under CC-BY-4.0 — see NOTICE for attribution. Indian court judgments are themselves public records (Indian Copyright Act, 1957, §52(1)(q)).
• IPC statute text is the text of the Indian Penal Code, a public-domain enactment of the Government of India.
• Curation (citation extraction, masking, formatting) © 2026 Clause Logic Inc.

This dataset is released under CC-BY-4.0: free to use, including commercially, with attribution.

Disclaimer

Provided "as is", without warranty of any kind. This dataset is for research and machine-learning purposes and does not constitute legal advice.