Reusing this record

Our own work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may copy it, share it, translate it, adapt it and use it commercially. You must credit Life in India, link to the page, name the licence and say if you changed anything.

1. Our words. The note on each entry, “Where things stand”, the summaries and standfirsts, our readings of reports, and the sentences we write around a Close Up piece.
2. The record as data. Each entry’s date, title, credits, citation and links; the “What it found” lists, which give a source’s findings in our words; the charts and tables we draw; and the Markdown and JSON copies of every page.
3. Text made with language models. Drafted by models and checked and chosen by the editor, as each page’s “How this was made” says. It is licensed on the same terms. How we use them.

How to credit. For example: Life in India, “Right to walk”, Long View 2, revision 1 (25 September 2026), lifeinindia.org/long-view/2-right-to-walk-footpaths/, CC BY 4.0. Each Long View gives its own citation beside its entries.

Every Close Up conversation is released into the public domain under CC0 1.0, with the agreement of the person we spoke with: the edited conversation, its transcript and, where we publish it, the recording. Read it, republish it, translate it, cut it, set it to music, sell it. You need not ask or credit anyone, though a link back helps others find the rest. Each conversation says so at its foot. Quotations from other people’s work inside a conversation keep their own terms.

These keep their owners’ terms. A licence from us cannot pass on rights we do not hold.

1. Quotations and excerpts from reports, articles, papers and books belong to their authors and publishers, named in full in each entry. We quote them for review under section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act, 1957: a short excerpt beside our own note. To reuse one, go to the source; every entry links to it, and to an archived copy.
2. Judgments and Acts may be reproduced by anyone under section 52(1)(q). We quote them at more length and link to the official text; use that.
3. Works in the public domain are free for everyone, from us or from anywhere. In India a work is free sixty years after its author’s death. Gandhi’s own words are free, and so is a translation of them by someone who died long enough ago, such as Mahadev Desai’s of the Autobiography. Other translations of the same books may not be: Sushila Nayar’s Key to Health is protected until 2062.
4. Openly licensed texts keep their own licence, named beside the quotation. A translation under CC BY-NC 4.0, for example, may not be reused commercially, whatever our licence says.
5. First-person accounts. The accounts in Close Up that people give us of their own lives (marked “As told to”) belong to the people who spoke. They agreed to be published here, not to be reused elsewhere, so their words are not licensed. If you would like to use them, write to us and we will ask them.
6. Photographs and images. Each carries its credit and licence beside it. Commissioned photographs belong to their photographers. Public-domain photographs, such as the 1930 Salt March picture on Long View 2, are marked so.
7. Our name and masthead. You may say that something comes from Life in India. Please do not use the name or the masthead in a way that suggests we made or endorse your work.
8. Type and code. Anek (EK Type) and Source Serif 4 are licensed under the SIL Open Font License. The site’s code is not covered by this licence.

The same terms apply to search engines, archives and language models. Reuse our words and data freely, with credit and a link. Credit the original authors of anything we quote before you credit us. Conversations are free to use; first-person accounts are not. llms.txt sets this out for machines.

If we quote your work and you think we have taken too much, or credited you wrongly, write to bhuvan@bebhuvan.com. We will fix it and say so on the corrections page.