Data for Justice is a movement towards open and actionable data in the law and justice space in India. We believe that access to data from governments, courts, scholars, civil society and other public and private organizations is fundamental to unlocking innovation and enhancing research, services, policy reform and advocacy.
This initiative was founded in June 2019 with a vision for a data-driven future in law and justice by (a) promoting a culture of data-use and data-sharing, and (b) engaging people in building data and technology commons.
A mission to develop Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered solutions for law and justice.
An open source platform to crowdsource and explore data related to law and justice.
“Data is power. Open data is public power. When government and researchers allow their data to be made public, it improves our understanding of the world and makes for better policy.”
Nick Robinson, Legal Researcher
Born out of our Data for Justice Challenge (2019), we launched Justice Hub in February 2021. It is a collaborative open source platform to crowdsource data related to the legal and justice system in India.
Taking another step further, we launched OpenNyAI in April 2021. It is a collaborative mission aimed at developing open source software and datasets to catalyze the creation of AI-powered solutions to improve access to justice in India.
All our initiatives and their output is open source.
Why do I believe that we should have open data? At the heart of the scientific process in any domain or on any question, is that there should be multiple, rival analyses based on the identical data. And the starting point for this is the public goods of high quality, standardised, accessible data.
Susan ThomasEconomist, Finance Research Group
Sharing the data set on an open access platform fosters research. We want our data set to be used by as many people as possible and let a thousand ideas bloom with what can be done with this data and how it can feed into a meaningful feedback loop for policymakers, litigants and court administration.
Bharti AliExecutive Director, HAQ: Centre for Child Rights
We are advancing the open data movement in India by investing in and increasing the capacity of a wide range of actors to use and work with open data to serve justice.
Envisioning a consultative and collaborative entrepreneurial effort that increases and evolves the use of publicly available justice data, in 2019 we launched a Data Challenge to create (a) a hub to share and co-create datasets, and (b) justice data projects by researchers and journalists. While the Data Challenge resulted in the formation of Justice Hub, at Agami we recognized the continued need to nurture and enhance the culture for data-sharing and data-use in the law and justice space, leading us to start the Data for Justice (D4J) initiative.
D4J hosts a variety of collaborative projects, such as Justice Hub and OpenNyAI, and actively fosters a community of data-enthusiasts, especially students, to take forward the open data movement.
With a starting fund of INR 1 crore, we invited applicants under two tracks:
To catalyze more datasets to be open and accessible for all, we evangelised the open data pledge for researchers, civil society organisations, think tanks, philanthropies and others to take. Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, Susan Thomas (IGIDR), Aparna Chandra (CLPG, NLU Delhi), Nick Robinson (independent researcher), Tata Trusts, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, Studio Nilima and CHRI are today pioneering by committing to the Open Data Pledge.
A jury of eminent individuals selected CivicDataLab to develop the JusticeHub, as a result of the Data for Justice Challenge.
JusticeHub empowers communities for data-driven justice by making legal and justice data open, accessible and actionable.
Justice Hub aims to increase the access to and interoperability of data along with advancing the open data movement in India by investing in and increasing the capacity of a wide range of actors to use and work with open data to serve justice.
In June 2021, we launched an annual 5-week program that seeks to bring students into the open justice data movement. In its first edition, law students worked under the mentorship of Prof. Rangin Pallav Tripathy of NLU Odisha and Civic Data Lab to create a dataset that profiles the backgrounds of all Indian High Court Judges (post 1993) across 47 parameters.
Since April 2021, we have organised 2 batches of students to partake in the OpenNyAI MOOC and Project, involving more than 60 students annotating more than 800 judgments to create training datasets for an AI Model, with a third batch of 90 students commencing in November 2021.
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