Be part of the Legal-Tech company changing India's Laws!

Why do we exist?

Nyaaya has been created by the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy as a legal-tech initiative focussed on explaining India's laws.

 India’s laws have always been the fiefdom of a handful of lawyers and bureaucrats. Contrast that with the fact that today, anybody can fire up a browser, type into a search bar, and find the most obscure scrap of information on everything from Bollywood to the bond market. But if you want to know any of the following:

• Is that cop screwing me by slapping me with a Rs. 2000 fine for my expired car insurance?
• Are these papers enough to prove ownership of that new flat I just bought?
• Can I be arrested for refusing to say “Bharat mata ki jai”?

 The Internet can’t help you any of these questions.

 We have a simple mission: Provide Indians with meaningful access to our laws.

We will realize this mission by building India’s first online searchable repository of every central and state law. Information about these laws will be available in simple English, and will be organized so that you get the answer you are looking for with minimal effort. Eventually we will make this available in India’s 22 official languages. We’ve already put together a fantastic team for content and outreach that is mining every nook and corner of central, state offices and other sources of data to put together a comprehensive set of laws, and thinking hard about how to communicate it. But this is only part of the solution.

What we need from our engineers

 We’re now looking for passionate engineers to join us in building a technology platform that will be worthy of our goal. Our tech team will have complete autonomy on all decisions relating to the technology architecture. We care most about solving these problems in the most efficient manner:

•  Content Management System: Our team will be constantly updating information on laws as we find them and writing explanations, annotations to make them more legible to the common man. We therefore need a killer CMS that will make changes easily and see the effects in near real time. To achieve this goal, we could use one of these platforms:
  • Wordpress/ Joomla/ Drupal/ Other great CMS suggestions welcome 

• Front-end: Since access is our primary goal, we need our front end to be super-fast and responsive on any device—both desktop and mobile. This means we need your skillset to cover:
  • JavaScript/Ruby on Rails
  • jQuery
  • HTML, CSS
  • Knowledge of the latest frameworks such as Angular, React is a bonus 

• Search: All the laws in the world are no good if the average user can’t find them. We need you to build us a superb search interface. This could mean:
  • Elastic Search/Solr/Lucene
  • Ongoing work on NLP to handle queries in conversational English 

• Digitization and data cleanup: We expect that a lot of our data will come from hard-copies of laws and poor quality PDFs, hence we’ll need to build ways to digitize this content. This will mean building:
  • OCR for English/other languages on poor quality PDFs
  • Rapid scanning techniques for hard-copies
  • Data cleanup/formatting for upload
  • Automated cross-referencing
  • Automated tagging post cleanup 

• Back end: We will need a robust backend that will pull together these elements in an elegant and scalable manner. For this you will need:
  • Database: Choose from SQL, NoSQL (we’re still arguing about this) we think you’ll need to know one of the following: Django/Apache/MongoDB/CouchDB/Other inputs welcome
  • Monitoring tools: StatsD, Nagios and Graphite
  • Some DevOps skills to ensure you can spin up servers super-quick when we manage to hit the big-time. 

What we DON’T care about

• Which college you went to
• How many years of experience you have
• What technology platform you choose to use
• When and where you do your best work 

What we DO care about: 

• Our mission resonates with you
• You know at least some of the technologies under each function listed above
• That you’re smart and will figure out a way when you don’t know something
• You’re obsessed with automation and finding a better way to do a manual task
• You will experiment, try, test, fail and learn all the time – with one problem at a time!

 What we offer:

• Decent pay
• Freedom for you to do things your way
• The satisfaction of solving a hard problem that helps a lot of people 
• 5 day work week.