India Court Judgments Scraper — Supreme Court, High Courts & Tribunals

Extract 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 scraper is a thin, BYO-token wrapper around the official Indian Kanoon API, which indexes more than 30 million judgments — 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.

Register at api.indiankanoon.org/signup/. New accounts receive Rs. 500 of free trial credit.
Copy your shared API token from the dashboard.
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

You provide an apiToken and at least one filter (search query, court, judge, citation, or date range).
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.
It POSTs to api.indiankanoon.org/search/ with your token in the Authorization header, paginating 10 results at a time until it reaches maxItems.
For each result it builds a flat record — case ID, title, court, dates, judge, citation counts, and so on.
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.
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

India Court Judgments Scraper - Supreme Court & High Courts API