Sakib-Dalal/IndianLegal-QA

IndianLegal-QA

A question-and-answer dataset derived from Indian legal and government documents, covering the Constitution of India, the Indian Penal Code, criminal and civil procedural law, customs and tariff classifications, and numerous central and state acts. The dataset is suitable for building, fine-tuning, and evaluating retrieval and question-answering systems over Indian legal text.

This dataset is also hosted on GitHub at Sakib-Dalal/IndianLegal-QA.

Overview

Each record is a paired question and answer extracted from an Indian legal source document. The questions ask factual questions about provisions, definitions, classifications, and procedures found in the source material, and the answers provide the corresponding textual response. Records use a simple two-field schema (question, answer).

Statistics

Data format

The dataset is provided as question_answers.csv (comma-separated pairs, one per row). The same content is also distributed on GitHub in question_answers.jsonl and question_answers.txt. Each example has two string fields:

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("Sakib-Dalal/IndianLegal-QA")
print(ds["train"])
print(ds["train"][0])

For local use, the CSV can be read with pandas:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_csv("question_answers.csv")

Domain coverage

The pairs draw from a wide range of Indian legal sources. Approximate coverage by topic:

The dataset spans the Constitution of India, IPC and CrPC, customs and tariff classification headings, civil and criminal procedure, and a broad set of central and state acts. A number of records are provided in Hindi and Marathi, making the dataset useful for multilingual legal NLP.

Example

Q: What is described as the flexibility of the Constitution?
A: Its flexibility lies in its amendments.

License

This dataset is released under the Apache License 2.0.

Citation

@dataset{dalal2026indianlegalqa,
  title   = {IndianLegal-QA},
  author  = {Dalal, Sakib},
  year    = {2026},
  repo    = {https://github.com/Sakib-Dalal/IndianLegal-QA},
  url     = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/Sakib-Dalal/IndianLegal-QA},
}