RMLNLU student creates legal documentation website Kagzaat simplifies creation of RTI applications Rent Agreements etc

Mohit Yadav, a first year student at Dr. Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University, Lucknow (RMLNLU) is the person behind the “online customised legal documentation solution” Kagzaat. The website allows users to prepare rent agreements, promissory notes and RTI applications by simply punching in a few details. Although some aspects of the website still need polishing, Mohit says that such online solutions hold tremendous potential in the country. In this e-mail interview, Mohit speaks about how the website came about, current problems and future plans..Bar & Bench: What is Kagzaat?.Mohit Yadav: Kagzaat is a tool, a website which acts as a virtual draftsman who drafts legal documents for you by asking simple questions. We like to describe it, in fancy words, as an “online customized legal documentation solution”. Basically the website asks the user a certain set of questions with each question having various options. The user then selects the options as per his needs and accordingly a document is generated. This makes each document generated of a uniform standard but, at the same time each document is also unique. The entire process is very simple and hassle-free. Added incentives of using Kagzaat are convenience, cost (it is absolutely free) and time (the process takes less than 5 minutes)..Bar & Bench: How did you come up with the idea?.Mohit Yadav: The idea of making Kagzaat struck me when I was doing my winter internship at District Courts, Gurgaon. There I saw the typists working at Photostat shops making these ordinary documents without having any knowledge of Law and charging exorbitant fees for the same. I had some knowledge of computer languages like C++, HTML, PHP etc. which lead me to believe that since the task is so mechanized it could be completely automated..Bar & Bench: So did you go ahead and create Kagzaat on your own?.Mohit Yadav: Kagzaat was not a project which I could have made single handed so a team was required. I first contacted two of my school friends, Kunal Daral and Sudhanshu Shekhar, who were pursuing engineering. Kunal initially helped me in developing the basic template of the website and right now helps me with the Javascript of the website. Sudhanshu on the other hand will be helping me out with our future plans..Apart from these two team members I would like to thank two very special people of my college Aj Agrawal and Gaurav Pathak who extensively supported me throughout the project..Bar & Bench: When did you launch this and what has the response been thus far?.Mohit Yadav: Kagzaat was launched on January 28, 2012. Initially the site hardly saw any visitors but slowly the word spread and it is now gaining some popularity. The response for Kagzaat has been quite different from what I anticipated: initially it was only the Indian masses visiting the site but now I am glad to report that approximately 47% of total visitors are from outside India. A majority of these visits are from the United States. The site is actually being used by people and I have received words of support, criticism and gratitude from some users. The response is pretty good in my opinion as the site is not something you would visit on a daily basis but something you would bookmark and use when the need arises..Bar & Bench: The RTI option still seems to be in testing mode. Any changes expected in the near future?.Mohit Yadav: The RTI option has a minor glitch in it; one has to write the questions manually rather than simply feeding it on the website. This glitch could simply be removed by adding few more lines of code but the problem is we are using a free hosting service and we do not want to make the website resource intensive. This might lead to us exceeding the free hosting limits so we are trying hard to find an alternate solution which works and is not very resource heavy. Hopefully we would work out something very soon..Bar & Bench: What are your future plans with Kagzaat?.Mohit Yadav: We have certain plans to expand our horizons. The first one being very obvious is adding up of more documents but for this we need people’s support we need to know what documents are needed the most by the people for daily use so that we could make these documents our first priority. For this people could reach us at contact@kagzaat.com or leave a comment at our Facebook page. The second plan is to make an android app for people on the move and the third being making a complete offline solution for those who do not have the access to internet. The second and third plan would take time due to constraint of time available to us to work on the project..One more idea is to make a complete video/pdf on how to file RTI from scratch covering basic questions like who is PIO, where to file RTI etc.?.Bar & Bench: Do you think something like this will work in India?.Mohit Yadav: My answer is an affirmative. The number of people going online is simply too huge in India. For example see the number of Indian users on Facebook. Even if 0.1% of these people actually use Kagzaat, the number would be huge. In this era of digitalization Kagzaat provides you with the option of convenience with zero cost, making it a viable option for many.