How we work
Editorial Policy
and Corrections.
This site puts a joke calculator next to statements about criminal law. That combination only works if the legal half is scrupulous. Here is how we handle it.
The line down the middle of this site
dowry.lol has two halves that follow different rules, and we keep them apart deliberately.
- The calculator is satire. Every figure it produces is invented. The multipliers are not researched market rates, they are a joke with a point. Nothing it outputs should be quoted as data, and we say so on the page itself and in llms.txt for anything reading this site automatically.
- Everything about the law is meant to be exactly right. Section numbers, penalties, dates, case citations. If any of it is wrong, that is a defect and we want to hear about it.
Where the legal content comes from
- Statutes are checked against the India Code ↗, the Government of India's official repository, rather than against secondary summaries.
- Judgments are cited by their Supreme Court Cases reference so they can be looked up independently.
- Crime figures come from the National Crime Records Bureau's Crime in India volumes, and we name the year of every figure.
- Where we cannot verify something, we leave it out. The chart on our statistics page has a visible gap for 2021 for exactly this reason. A missing bar is better than a number we cannot stand behind.
What we do not do
- We do not give legal advice. Nothing here is a substitute for a lawyer who knows your facts. See the legal disclaimer.
- We do not take money to change what a page says. There are no ads, no sponsorships and no affiliate links anywhere on this site.
- We do not collect your calculator inputs. The calculator runs entirely in your browser and the values never leave it. See the privacy notice for what is measured.
- We do not present the satire as research.
Review and dating
Legal pages carry a "reviewed" date and a machine-readable dateModified. The
recodification of Indian criminal law in 2024 is a live example of why: pages written
against IPC 498A needed rewriting for
BNS 85, and anything still citing only the old numbers is
out of date.
We re-check the legal pages when a relevant statute or leading judgment changes, and otherwise at least annually.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell us. Include the page and, if you can, the source that shows the correct position. We would rather be corrected than be quoted incorrectly.
- Substantive legal errors are fixed as a priority, and the page's review date is updated.
- Broken or changed helpline numbers are treated the same way. A wrong number on that page is a real-world failure, not a typo.
- Takedown and privacy requests go through the contact page.
Who publishes this
dowry.lol is a public-awareness project, and a product by Azonova. It is not a law firm, not a government body, and not affiliated with any of the authorities it links to. More on the reasoning behind the project is on the about page.
The calculator that started all this See what your dahej would be Open the calculator