Indicodes Rules

India's building rules as open, cited, dated data.

What may be built on a plot in India is written across master plans, bye-laws, amendments, circulars and court orders — mostly as PDFs, often scanned, rarely versioned. This repository turns those rules into structured data anyone can read, check and build on. Every value carries the clause, page and words it was read from, and the date it took effect.

It starts with one slice, end to end: plotted residential development in Delhi under the DDA — Master Plan for Delhi 2021 and the Unified Building Bye-Laws 2016.

Verified rules	54
Draft rules (not yet reviewed)	25
Parameters	10
Source documents registered	7

What a rule looks like

{
  "rule_id": "mpd2021_mod_2022.res_plotted.far.250_750",
  "parameter": "far",
  "applicability": { "land_use": "residential_plotted", "authority": "DDA",
    "conditions": [{ "fact": "plot_area_sqm", "op": "between", "value": [250, 750] }] },
  "output": { "type": "scalar", "value": 225, "unit": "far_x100" },
  "effective_from": "2007-02-07",
  "citations": [{ "doc_id": "mpd2021_mod_2022", "page": 63,
    "bbox": [0.2812, 0.1949, 0.8411, 0.2091],
    "original_text": "4 Above 250 to 750 75 225 6" }],
  "verification": { "status": "verified", "verified_by": "Indicodes review" }
}

The schema is rules/schema/rule.schema.json. Bands are (lo, hi]. A rule is never edited once verified: a change is a new rule that supersedes it, so every past answer stays reproducible.

How far to trust it

• Verified means a reviewer checked the value against the cited page. It does not mean independently tested: the benchmark — two experienced readers working the same plots blind from the documents — has no cases yet (data/validation/).
• Every number cites its source. Check it there.
• MPD-2047 was notified on 20 August 2026. Its rules are drafts here; which plan governs a plot today is not settled by this data.
• Decision support, not statutory sanction. Verify with the sanctioning authority.

Use it

The rules are plain JSON — read them with anything. To get the answer for a plot exactly as the rules combine (bands, dates, the next-lower-category minimum, declared gaps), use the engine:

import { evaluatePlot, validateParcelFacts } from "@indicodes/engine";
import { loadDeclarations, loadRuleCorpus } from "@indicodes/rules-tools";

const facts = validateParcelFacts({
  plot_area_sqm: 400, road_width_m: 9, roads_abutting: 1, is_corner_plot: false,
  land_use: "residential_plotted", authority: "DDA",
  stilt_parking: false, basement_intended: false, special_area_flags: [],
});
if (facts.ok) {
  const result = evaluatePlot(facts.facts, loadRuleCorpus("rules"), "2026-08-19", "local", {
    ...loadDeclarations("rules"),
  });
  console.log(result.parameters.far, result.flags);
}

The engine is pure TypeScript with no I/O. Where the rules do not settle a question, it declines and says why — it never guesses.

pnpm install
pnpm test              # engine, tools, and the logic sweep over the real rules
pnpm rules:validate    # schema + cross-file checks
python -m pytest pipeline/tests

Layout

Path	What
rules/<document>/	One rule per file, grouped by source document
rules/schema/	JSON Schemas for rules and definitions
rules/*.json	What the corpus declares about itself: band gaps in the source, minimums, what is not modelled, what is newer and unread
sources/sources.json	Registry of source documents, with file hashes
sources/pages/	Single-page extracts of every cited page
packages/engine/	The deterministic engine (evaluatePlot)
packages/rules-tools/	Validator, loaders, benchmark, logic sweep
pipeline/	Second read against the PDFs, the notice watcher, sign-off helper
data/validation/	The blind double-read benchmark

Contributing

Report an error, propose a rule, review one, register a new notice, or read benchmark plots blind. Nothing becomes verified until a second person has checked it against the page. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Licence

• Data (rules/, sources/sources.json, data/): CC BY 4.0 — see LICENSE-DATA.md. Credit "Indicodes Rules".
• Code (packages/, pipeline/): Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.
• Page extracts and quoted source text are from government publications; see LICENSE-DATA.md.

The Indicodes app at www.indicodes.com reads this data; the app itself is a separate product.