A record layer for the documents a government office writes for itself — SOPs, handbooks, standing instructions, office memoranda, circulars. The things that are not correspondence and never become a file.
Government already wrote the rule. Nobody built the thing.
The Central Secretariat Manual of Office Procedure, 16th
edition, 2022, added a chapter on knowledge management. Para 11.9 asks for the
instructions on a subject to be consolidated into one self-contained document, with
their sources and amendments listed and hyperlinked… so as to facilitate a user to
see changes/updations introduced over time
, each update superseding the one before
it.
The dashboard that holds it shall be set up in eOffice by every Section, Unit and Desk. The consolidation itself is only may. Sanchika builds what 11.9 describes. It is not a proposal to do something new.
The mandate exists. The tool exists. The practice ignores both.
The machinery predates the rule. NIC's Knowledge Management System has had check-in and check-out, compare-to-previous-revision and a review-gated publish since 2013, and names Manuals and Guidelines among its content types. So the gap is not capability and not policy. It is what gets published.
An SOP amended by letter directing substitutions — "Para-2(i) and 5(a) … be substituted as under". No revised SOP is issued; the reader holds three documents and performs the substitution in their head.
Seven office memoranda consolidated by hand, each paragraph footnoted to its source
— 11.9 attempted manually, and attempted well. But it captures the essence
and never says in supersession of
. Eight live documents where one should be.
A live legal handbook versioned in the filename: HBP_07_2026_Chapter_01.pdf. No stamp inside, no "updated as on" line, and Chapter 11 still on the 2023 path.
The authors of the Knowledge Management System distribute their own SOPs as PDFs off a static download page.
An SOP for dog handlers stamped on every page "File No. A-33025/16/2021-PM-K9 CELL … Generated from eOffice". Its identity is a file number.
Across five organisations we could not find one versioned, maintained document. That is our search result rather than an audit — but it is where their own published output leads.
An instruction has no recipient and no disposal. Its whole life is revision.
eOffice handles a document from the moment it is
received by the organization till the time it is disposed of
— in at a receipt, out
at dispatch. The manual's vocabulary follows: a file is notes and correspondence, a case
is a file or a receipt, an issue is a communication. The unit is something that arrives,
is considered and is answered. A standing instruction is none of those. It is addressed
to nobody, never disposed of, and the only question it raises is which version is in
force, what changed, and who needs to know.
An amendment is an instruction against a text, and it gets executed correctly. What no document shows is the consequence elsewhere. A 2013 amendment to a set of central packaging rules lifted two definitions out of an Explanation and re-inserted them as clauses of an earlier rule. The sentence citing them was not amended, and reads character for character as before:
(b) packaged commodities meant for industrial consumers or institutional consumers.Both citations now point somewhere else. A redline of that paragraph is empty, because nothing in it changed. The officer who approved it did nothing wrong; the tool in front of them showed nothing. Those rules are the visible case only because they are published — the same failure runs through every SOP and checklist written against them.
None of this needs a new law.
It needs the document to stop being an attachment and start being a record — one that can say what changed, and to whom it matters.
Review that ranks changes by consequence, not by position on the page.
Verso, the software underneath Sanchika, reads a proposed revision and orders what changed by how much it matters. The cross-reference case sits at the top, in these words: "A link now points somewhere else. The words you see did not change." That is the class a redline structurally cannot show.
Opened, it shows both citations moving, and underneath, the sentence they sit in — unmarked, because nothing in it changed. That is what today's tools would have given the reviewer.
And it says out loud what approving will record.
The amber line in both captures is the product reporting its own limit: grouping is not certified, so nothing is collapsed. We would rather ship that sentence than hide it.
Three more things that exist rather than are planned.
Proposals from people with no account
A consultation reply, or a field officer who knows the answer, lands in the same queue as everything else. The person holding the correction is rarely the person holding the document.
Search on the department's own hardware
Full text and vectors, no key, no network call. The honest limit: generated answers are not local. Without an external model the system returns one plain sentence rather than an invented one.
Visibility that is structural, at file level
Each surface reads its own branch, so a page above that surface's visibility is not in the tree — a term on an internal page returns zero hits on public search. Classification within one document is a different mechanism and is not built.
A Master Circular is a build step, not a clerical one.
An amending instruction is already a locator and a replacement: for the words "thirty days", substitute "sixty days". When the instruction and the text are both structured, applying it is something a machine does and shows its working for.
The consolidated document is then derived rather than maintained: what it says today, what it said on any past date, and which source put each sentence there. That is 11.9's hyperlinked provenance, generated instead of retyped.
Reading about review is much worse than doing one.
Open a real review, and approve it or refuse it
The software runs. A public demonstration is being prepared on a plainly fictional department's handbook. It will let anyone with a browser:
- open the ledger above and click into any change;
- see the cross-reference case beside its empty redline;
- approve part of it, and read the count that gets recorded;
- propose a change of their own, without an account.
Five minutes, no login, nothing touching a government system. The link is not public yet. If someone sent you this page, ask them for it rather than for a meeting.
The officer with a phone is reading, not signing.
What people do on a phone is check what the current instruction says — in a corridor, in a field office, in a meeting. Today that means pinching into a scanned attachment found in an email.
There is nothing to download. Sanchika is one web application at every width, and a phone browser can add it to the home screen, where it opens without an address bar. No store listing, no iOS or Android build, nothing waiting on anybody's review. What that buys in a district office is the next picture: the pages a reader has already opened stay readable when the line goes, and each one says how old it is before it says anything else.
no answer from the siterather than
offlinebecause the browser still reported a connection — which is what a bad line looks like from inside one · Verso, running
Reading, search and "suggest a change" are the same web application at any width, so they work on a phone now, with no install. Editing does not belong there. A small share of blocks can only be edited as raw source, and a modal saying so on a 360-pixel screen is the worst possible first touch.
Approving is not reading, and the software refuses to let the two blur. As the list is drawn, each change is put to the device: can this screen actually render it? A wide table at 360 pixels cannot be, so it is marked in the list, it cannot be opened, and while it is there the control that approves everything at once is not greyed out — it is gone.
ask for changes, because two of the sixteen changes are tables this screen cannot draw. The judgement is made on the handset, not on the server — only the device knows how wide the device is · Verso, running
There are no native apps — none built, none designed, none needed for anything here. Every frame above is Chromium at 360 × 780 device-independent pixels, three times over, against the same fictional department and the same real rules as the wide captures earlier on this page.
One thing in this section has no picture and will not get one
from us. Android's add to home screen
prompt is raised by the browser on its own
engagement rules, and an automated run does not satisfy them, so there is nothing here
to photograph. Drawing it would have been the easiest image in this deck and the only
false one.
What is built, and what is only designed.
The left column runs today and opens in a browser. The right column is intention. The second list is what a pilot would be for.
Running
- Markdown in a git repository as the canonical record
- The change ledger, ordered by editorial consequence
- The cross-reference detector and five other change classes
- The approve bar and its stored unopened count
- Proposals from people with no account
- Full-text and vector search with no external call
- Per-surface, per-branch visibility at file level
Designed, not built
- The compiler that derives consolidated text
- Signatures of any kind — there is no cryptography in it today
- Post and delegation credentials, and anything resting on them
- Classification within a document, paragraph by paragraph
- An importer for the existing pile of Word attachments
- Bilingual consolidation. An amending instruction is drafted against one language; applying it across a diglot corpus is unsolved, and it is a first-week question rather than a later one
What the department would keep.
- The code. Open source under a permissive licence is the intention, and the preferred option under MeitY's own 2015 policy on open source adoption. The owning entity is not settled and we will not pretend it is; that is the first thing we would want decided with you.
- The deployment. Designed to run inside the department's own perimeter. Content does not leave it for search or retrieval.
- The exit. The record is a directory of readable text files under version control. It opens in any editor, without our software, in fifty years.
Eight weeks, one subject, and one hour of somebody's time at the end.
Name a subject on which this organisation has issued instructions over the years — the original, and every amendment and clarification issued against it since. All of it is already published. We produce the Master Circular 11.9 describes: one self-contained document, every paragraph hyperlinked to the instruction that put it there.
What you provide
The subject, and a contact at Director or Deputy Secretary level in the administering division to tell us when the output is wrong. No systems access, no data, no security clearance, no budget.
What you get at week eight
The consolidated document, and a written note on what the compiler could not do and why. Both yours to keep, whatever is agreed next.
One meeting at week eight. If the document is not right, this stops there, having cost the department two hours.
If eight weeks is not the right first step, the smaller thing we would ask instead is two hours sitting with a section while an instruction is revised. No interview — just watching where the merge happens and what gets lost.