Datasets and other updates from the Justice Hub community

Pardon our delay in publishing the newsletter for August. The team is now working to release the final datasets around information related to our High Court Judges as part of the Summer of Data initiative. More updates on this soon. Here are a few more recent updates from the Justice Hub community.

• CivicDataLab signs an MoU with NLU Odisha - One of our goals this year is to invest in building the capacity of organisations and institutions to collect, process and manage datasets. Through this partnership, we will be conducting capacity-building sessions for students, faculty members and non-teaching staff on data management, data analysis and other aspects of data-related research in law and justice. As a part of this collaboration, we will also be setting up a data help desk within the Centre for Law, Public Policy and Good Governance, a research centre at NLU Odisha, to support data-based research. This MoU will allow us to collaborate with more students, faculty members and researchers and we hope to see an increase in contributions to the Justice Hub as we progress ahead. Read more about our partnership here.

• Parliament Question Hour Tracker - The monsoon session of the parliament concluded on August 08th. The Parliament Session Wrap released by PRS Legislative Research is a good summary of bills passed, introduced and withdrawn in this session. As per the vital stats released by PRS, the question hour functioned for 47% of scheduled time in Rajya Sabha and 34% in Lok Sabha. Legal Aid, Case Pendency, Women Lawyers, FCRA, and Nirbhaya Fund were some topics that came up during the question hour. We have developed a tracker to compile a list of Law and Justice related questions featured in this session. We are now working on publishing a few data points shared as responses on the Justice Hub.

Alternate Data Source: The Question Hour: Indian Parliament Dataset, developed and maintained by the Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD) is a dataset of all questions & answers asked between 1999 (Winter Session) and 2019 (Winter Session) along with the full text of the questions.

• Social Media Compliance Reports - The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) team has been analysing the transparency reports released by social media organisations. The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (2021 IT rules) were issued in February 2021 and came into effect concerning significant social media intermediaries in May 2021. One such provision of the 2021 IT Rules (Rule 4(1)(d)) requires social media platforms to publish monthly compliance reports. In these reports, they are required to mention the details of complaints received and action taken thereon, and the number of specific communication links or parts of information that the social media platform has removed or disabled access to, by proactive monitoring. You can check their detailed analysis here.

• Crimes against Women - The Criminal Justice team at Vidhi launched the Crimes Against Women portal. The team evaluated legislative thinking, executive action & judicial interpretation to find reasons behind the continued rise in violence against women in India. Here they analysed legislative debates of laws tackling crimes against women, responses to applications filed under RTI  from States/UTs and judgements in cases of rape & cruelty. The state-wise factsheets, curated using data from the Crime in India reports, are available here.

• Annual Review of State Laws - PRS released Annual Review of State Laws, 2021. They have sourced data from state legislature websites, state gazettes, and responses to Right to Information requests. The report focuses on the law-making activity of 30 state legislatures in 2021. You can check the report on the Justice Hub here. To learn more about the latest reports and datasets uploaded on the Justice Hub, subscribe to the Justice Hub RSS feed.

• Crime Victimisation Surveys - A working paper by Ajay Shah and Renuka Sane on Crime Victimisation Surveys in Indian Criminal Justice reform was released on the XKDR Forum. In this paper, they share details on the role of measurement in the Criminal Justice System and the history of crime victimisation surveys in India. If you are interested in this topic, do check the report from the Safety Trends and Reporting of Crime (SATARC) survey by IDFC institute on the Justice Hub. The authors have also shared info about alternate datasets that can be used to study a few aspects related to victimisation. Here is an excerpt from the paper:

Another source of information on incidence of crime have been surveys such as the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) and the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) - though strictly not about measuring crime - they provide an indicator of some kinds of crimes experienced by survey respondents. These are particularly valuable because these survey datasets also contain a rich array of other information about the households.

If you would like to share updates about your projects and initiatives with the Justice Hub community, write to us at info@justicehub.in

Data Tip of the month

How to use the IMPORTDATA function in Google Sheets to explore any CSV file on the Justice Hub.

We’re Hiring!!

We need more hands and ideas to enable everyone to see and solve justice problems using data. If you’re keen to collaborate, do apply for the Justice Hub — Data and Policy Associate.