Indian Kanoon API Scraper — India Court Judgments (Supreme Court, High Courts & Tribunals)

Access the Indian Kanoon API (api.indiankanoon.org) — also written IndianKanoon — via a thin, BYO-token Apify wrapper. The actor extracts structured records of Indian court judgments and orders from the Supreme Court of India, all 24 High Courts, central tribunals (NCLT, NGT, ITAT, CESTAT, etc.), Law Commission reports, and central acts. The official Indian Kanoon API indexes more than 30 million judgments, making it the largest single source of decided case law in India.

What this Actor returns

• 25+ structured fields per judgment: case title, court, jurisdiction tier, publish date, authoring judge, citation count, citing/cited cases, and canonical URL
• Optional full judgment text (HTML and plain text) and acts cited, opt-in via the fetchFullText flag
• Filter by court, free-text keyword, authoring judge, citation, date range, or any combination
• Sort by relevance (best for keyword search) or by date — newest or oldest first
• Coverage across India's full judicial hierarchy: Supreme Court → 24 High Courts → tribunals → central laws → Constitution → Law Commission

Required: Indian Kanoon API token

This is a BYO-API-token actor. It does not include credit for the underlying Indian Kanoon service.

1. Register at api.indiankanoon.org/signup/. New accounts receive Rs. 500 of free trial credit.
2. Copy your shared API token from the dashboard.
3. Paste it into the apiToken input field when running the actor.

Indian Kanoon's per-call pricing (billed by IK directly to the token holder, on top of any Apify usage):

Call type	Cost (INR)
Search page (10 results)	0.50
Document metainfo	0.02
Full document HTML	0.20
Original court PDF copy	0.50

A search of 100 results with fetchFullText: false costs roughly Rs. 5 (10 search pages). Toggling fetchFullText: true adds Rs. 0.20 per record. Plan accordingly.

ToS note: Per Indian Kanoon's terms, downstream rendering of these results to end users requires displaying the "Powered by IKanoon" attribution. The actor returns raw structured data; attribution is the consumer's responsibility.

Who uses Indian court data and why?

• Indian legal-tech startups — build precedent search, citation graphs, and AI-driven research tools without scraping eCourts directly
• Compliance and corporate litigation teams — screen counterparties and directors for past or pending litigation
• Law firms and litigators — surface judgments authored by a specific judge or interpreting a specific section
• Legal academics and researchers — bulk-pull judgments by court, period, or topic for empirical and doctrinal studies
• Journalists and policy analysts — monitor recent rulings on constitutional, civil-rights, regulatory, or commercial matters
• AI/ML teams — train and evaluate legal language models on structured Indian case-law data

How the scraper works

1. You provide an apiToken and at least one filter (search query, court, judge, citation, or date range).
2. The actor builds an Indian Kanoon formInput query string — for example, right to privacy doctypes: supremecourt fromdate: 1-1-2017 todate: 31-12-2017 sortby: mostrecent.
3. It POSTs to api.indiankanoon.org/search/ with your token in the Authorization header, paginating 10 results at a time until it reaches maxItems.
4. For each result it builds a flat record — case ID, title, court, dates, judge, citation counts, and so on.
5. If fetchFullText: true, it additionally calls /doc/{tid}/ per record to pull the full judgment HTML, citing cases, cited-by cases, and a regex-extracted list of acts referenced.
6. Records are streamed to the Apify dataset as they're collected.

Input

Right-to-privacy line of cases at the Supreme Court

{
  "apiToken": "your_indian_kanoon_token",
  "query": "right to privacy",
  "court": "supremecourt",
  "orderBy": "mostrecent",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Delhi High Court judgments by a specific judge

{
  "apiToken": "your_indian_kanoon_token",
  "court": "delhi",
  "author": "Sanjeev Sachdeva",
  "orderBy": "mostrecent",
  "maxItems": 100
}

All Bombay High Court IP cases in a date range

{
  "apiToken": "your_indian_kanoon_token",
  "query": "trademark infringement",
  "court": "bombay",
  "fromDate": "2023-01-01",
  "toDate": "2024-12-31",
  "maxItems": 200
}

Look up a specific case by citation

{
  "apiToken": "your_indian_kanoon_token",
  "citation": "(2017) 10 SCC 1",
  "maxItems": 5
}

Full judgment text for further analysis (more expensive)

{
  "apiToken": "your_indian_kanoon_token",
  "query": "Section 138 Negotiable Instruments Act",
  "court": "supremecourt",
  "fetchFullText": true,
  "maxItems": 25
}

Tribunals — NCLT/ITAT/NGT decisions

{
  "apiToken": "your_indian_kanoon_token",
  "query": "insolvency resolution",
  "court": "tribunals",
  "orderBy": "mostrecent",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Input parameters

Field	Type	Default	Description
apiToken	string	(required)	Your paid Indian Kanoon API token. Stored as a secret.
query	string	"right to privacy"	Free-text search over judgment content and metadata. Use double quotes for phrases. Supports IK syntax: author:, cites:, citedby:, etc.
court	string	"supremecourt"	Restrict to a specific court. See the cheat sheet below. Empty string = all courts.
author	string	""	Authoring-judge filter (partial match, e.g. Chandrachud, Bhushan).
citation	string	""	Citation filter (e.g. (2017) 10 SCC 1 for Puttaswamy).
fromDate	string	""	Earliest publish date, ISO YYYY-MM-DD. Converted internally to IK's DD-MM-YYYY.
toDate	string	""	Latest publish date, ISO YYYY-MM-DD.
orderBy	string	"relevance"	relevance, mostrecent, or leastrecent.
fetchFullText	boolean	false	If true, additionally fetch the full HTML body of each judgment. Adds Rs. 0.20 per record to your IK bill.
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum records to return. Each search page returns 10 results (Rs. 0.50 per page).
proxyConfiguration	object	disabled	Proxy settings. Not required — IK is a public API.

Court cheat sheet

Code	Court
supremecourt	Supreme Court of India
delhi	Delhi High Court
bombay	Bombay High Court
madras	Madras High Court
calcutta	Calcutta High Court
kerala	Kerala High Court
karnataka	Karnataka High Court
allahabad	Allahabad High Court
andhra	Andhra Pradesh / pre-bifurcation Andhra & Telangana
chattisgarh	Chhattisgarh High Court
gauhati	Gauhati High Court
gujarat	Gujarat High Court
himachal_pradesh	Himachal Pradesh High Court
jammu	Jammu & Kashmir High Court
jharkhand	Jharkhand High Court
madhyapradesh	Madhya Pradesh High Court
meghalaya	Meghalaya High Court
manipur	Manipur High Court
orissa	Orissa / Odisha High Court
patna	Patna High Court
punjab	Punjab & Haryana High Court
rajasthan	Rajasthan High Court
sikkim	Sikkim High Court
telangana	Telangana High Court
tripura	Tripura High Court
uttaranchal	Uttarakhand High Court
tribunals	Tribunals (NCLT, NGT, ITAT, CESTAT, etc.)
central	Central Indian acts
lawcommissionofindia	Law Commission of India reports
constitution	Constitution of India

Output

Each dataset record carries the following fields:

Field	Type	Description
doc_id	number	Indian Kanoon document ID — use to fetch the full doc via https://indiankanoon.org/doc/{doc_id}/.
title	string	Case title, typically "Petitioner vs Respondent on Date".
court	string	Full court name (e.g. "Supreme Court of India").
court_code	string	IK doctype code (supremecourt, delhi, etc.).
jurisdiction_level	string	Hierarchy: supreme, high_court, tribunal, central, law_commission, or other.
publish_date	string	Date of judgment / publication, ISO YYYY-MM-DD.
publish_year	number	Year of judgment.
author	string	Authoring judge or bench description.
headline	string	Search-result snippet with HTML highlights stripped, truncated to 1,000 characters.
doctype	string	Indian Kanoon document-type code.
num_cites	number	Number of cases this judgment cites.
num_cited_by	number	Number of later cases citing this judgment.
has_court_copy	boolean	True when an original court PDF is available via /origdoc/{doc_id}/.
citations	string[]	Cases this judgment cites (only populated with fetchFullText: true). Up to 25.
cited_by	string[]	Later cases citing this judgment (only with fetchFullText: true). Up to 25.
acts_cited	string[]	Indian Acts referenced in the body — Indian Penal Code, Negotiable Instruments Act, Constitution Articles, etc. Only with fetchFullText: true.
full_text	string	Plain-text judgment body (only with fetchFullText: true).
full_text_html	string	HTML judgment body, truncated to 100,000 characters.
url	string	Canonical Indian Kanoon URL.
api_url	string	Indian Kanoon API URL.
scraped_at	string	ISO timestamp of when the record was scraped.

What this actor does NOT cover

• Live case status / next hearing date — these belong to the eCourts portal (services.ecourts.gov.in), not Indian Kanoon. IK indexes decided judgments and orders, not live docket status.
• CNR numbers — Case Number Records are an eCourts-internal identifier and aren't reliably exposed in IK metadata. Use doc_id (Indian Kanoon's tid) as the stable PAN-India identifier instead.
• District court records — coverage in IK is sparse below the High Court level.
• Pending cases that haven't been decided — by definition not in IK.

If you need any of the above, you'll need a different scraper that talks to eCourts directly. eCourts uses aggressive captcha and is not in scope for this actor.

Pricing model

You pay Apify per record (per the actor's PPE pricing) and you pay Indian Kanoon directly for each search/document call charged against your IK token. The two bills are independent. The actor is a thin, transparent wrapper — the IK costs are a 1:1 pass-through, not marked up.

Useful links

• Indian Kanoon API home
• Indian Kanoon API documentation
• Indian Kanoon API pricing
• Indian Kanoon search tips (query syntax, filters, operators)
• Sign up for an API token