How this site is sourced — and where AI is used
A reference site earns trust by being checkable. This page sets out the rules the rest of the site follows: what counts as a source, how figures are dated, how state differences are handled, and the specific, visible way AI-assisted reasoning is separated from cited fact.
India Impulse publishes 33 long-form pages and 15 short-answer pages about living in India. Every one of them carries a source list, a verification date, and a provenance note. Nothing on the site asks to be taken on faith.
The source hierarchy
A claim is sourced as high up this list as it can be. Where a lower tier is the only available source, the page says so.
- 1
Official
The ministry, department or statutory authority that actually administers the thing being described — UIDAI for Aadhaar, the Income Tax Department for PAN and returns, EPFO for provident fund, MoRTH and Parivahan for vehicles and licences, the MEA for passports, a state revenue department for land records.
- 2
Law
The Act, rules or notification itself, where the precise wording matters — the Consumer Protection Act 2019, the Right to Information Act 2005, the Aadhaar Act 2016, the Income-tax Act, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, the Motor Vehicles Act, or a state tenancy or stamp act.
- 3
Regulator
Bodies that decide disputes and publish how they decide them — the RBI and its Ombudsman schemes, SEBI, IRDAI, TRAI, PNGRB, state electricity regulatory commissions and consumer commissions at district, state and national level.
- 4
Statistics
The Census of India, MoSPI and the NSO, the RBI's own data releases, NFHS, PLFS and other official data producers, used for anything numeric about the country.
- 5
Research / news
Universities, peer-reviewed work, PRS Legislative Research, the CAG's reports and established newsrooms — used for context and for dating events, never as the sole authority for a rule, rate or entitlement.
AI-assisted analysis is labelled twice
Once where it appears in the text, and again in the source list. It is never allowed to sit in a paragraph looking like a sourced fact.
AI is used on this site the way a research assistant is used: to read the source material, structure it, draft prose, and cross-check claims against each other. That work is invisible and unremarkable — the same as any editorial tooling.
What is not invisible is the second kind of AI output: a conclusion that no cited document actually contains. “Call 1930 before you call the bank.” “An RTI works better than a fourth complaint.” “This is the step most applications get rejected on.” Those are judgments. No department published them. They are reasoning over the sources, and they are marked as such:
Every page containing such a passage also carries a matching entry in its source list, in a separate block headed “Not a source — AI-assisted analysis on this page”, with no link, because there is nothing to link to. Machine-readable copies of the site (llms.txt and llms-full.txt) carry the same distinction, so a model quoting this site can carry it through rather than flattening our reasoning into an official-sounding fact.
Twenty-eight states, not one procedure
Getting this wrong is the single most common failure in Indian how-to content.
The Constitution’s Seventh Schedule splits every subject into three lists. The State List covers land and land revenue, public order and police, public health and hospitals, agriculture, water, local government and state taxes — which is why stamp duty, registration charges, land records, tenancy law, ration cards, electricity tariffs, professional tax, road tax and school admission rules all differ by state, sometimes drastically.
The Union List covers defence, foreign affairs, citizenship, banking, insurance, income tax, railways, telecommunications and inter-state commerce — which is why PAN, Aadhaar, income tax, EPFO, passports, RBI-regulated banking and TRAI-regulated telecom work the same way everywhere.
The Concurrent List — education, criminal law and procedure, marriage and divorce, contracts, bankruptcy, forests, electricity — is where both may legislate, and where Union law prevails in a conflict. In practice, this is where most of the confusion lives.
Where an answer differs by state, the page says so and points at the state department. A page that only describes the Union position will say that too.
Everything is dated
Because in India a great deal of it changes on 1 April.
Each page shows the date its facts were last checked against the sources. That date — not the build date — drives the lastmod in the sitemap and the dateModified in the structured data. A deploy that changes no content changes no date. The site-wide review date is currently 2026-07-31.
Income tax slabs, rebates and the standard deduction change with the Union Budget and take effect from 1 April. EPF interest is declared annually. Stamp duty and circle rates are revised by states, often without notice. Government portals are rebuilt and their URLs change. Treat any figure from a previous financial year as indicative and confirm it with the department.
What this site is not
- Not legal, medical, tax or financial advice. It is general information about publicly documented processes.
- Not a government service. We cannot look up your Aadhaar, check your PF claim, track your application or act on your behalf.
- Not a substitute for the department. Where this site and an official source disagree, the official source wins — and we want to know so we can fix it.
- Not an agent, and not connected to one. Everything described here can be done directly on a government portal for the statutory fee, or for nothing.
- Not comprehensive on anything discretionary. Insurance claim disputes, property title questions and police matters turn on individual facts we cannot see.
Questions about how we work
Is India Impulse an official government website?
No. It is an independent reference site with no affiliation to, endorsement from, or funding by the Government of India or any state government. Where a page describes a government process, it links to the department page that governs it so you can verify the description at the source.
How do you decide what counts as a source?
In tiers. The administering department comes first, then the Act or notification itself, then the regulator that decides disputes, then official statistics, and only then research and news. A rule, fee or entitlement is never sourced to a news article or a YouTube tutorial alone.
Where exactly is AI used on this site?
AI is used to draft, structure and cross-check the writing, and to reason over the cited sources. Any conclusion that no cited document actually states — a comparison, a judgment about which option suits whom, an ordering of steps — appears in a dashed, labelled AI-assisted analysis callout and is repeated as an explicit AI-analysis entry in the page's source list.
Does that mean the facts are AI-generated?
No. Facts are taken from the sources listed on each page and are checked against them. The AI labelling exists precisely so that the two things stay visibly separate: what a department says, and what we concluded from it.
How do you handle differences between states?
Explicitly. Stamp duty and registration charges, land and tenancy law, ration cards and PDS entitlements, electricity tariffs, school admission rules, professional tax, road tax and police procedure in practice all vary by state. Where an answer differs, the page says so and points at the state department, rather than describing one state and generalising.
How current are the figures?
Every page carries the date its facts were last verified, and that same date drives the sitemap and the structured data. Indian thresholds commonly change on 1 April with the financial year, budget announcements alter slabs and limits, and portals are periodically rebuilt — so a figure more than a year old should be confirmed with the responsible department.
Why don't your pages quote exact fees and slabs?
Because a page that never states a rate cannot silently state a wrong one. Where a fee, slab, limit or processing time changes regularly, we describe the mechanism and link to the page where the current figure lives. Where a figure is quoted, it carries the date it was checked.