Legal
Privacy Policy
निजता नीति
Patrika Portal is a research archive, not an advertising business. We record the least we can while still controlling access to copyrighted scholarly material, and we sell nothing to anyone.
What we collect
You can browse every journal, article listing, author and subject on this portal without an account and without telling us anything about yourself. We ask for information only at the point where you want to open a PDF, save a bookmark, or request an article.
When you create an account
- Your email address. This is the only field we require. It is how you sign in and the only way we can reach you.
- A six-digit sign-in code. We never store the code itself — only a one-way cryptographic hash of it. Nobody with access to our database, including us, can read a code and use it.
- There is no password. This portal has never had one, so there is no password of yours for us to leak.
What you may choose to add
Your profile page offers a full name, phone number, institution, scholarly interests and a short biography. Every one of these is optional, they are used only to address you properly and to understand who the archive serves, and you can clear any of them at any time.
Why we collect it
The material in this archive is copyrighted. Much of it was re-typeset, proofread and prepared at the trust’s expense, and the trust is answerable to the scholars and publishers who entrusted it. Knowing who has opened which edition is what allows us to keep offering it openly to researchers rather than locking it away.
We also record the searches that return nothing. That list is not about you — it is the single most useful signal we have about which journals to digitise next, expressed in the words readers actually use.
The download log
Each time a PDF is opened we record the article, whether it was the raw scan or the refined edition, the time, and your account. This log is an access record for copyrighted material and it is not optional.
Your IP address is hashed, not stored. We keep a one-way hash so that a pattern of abuse can be recognised without us holding a list of the addresses our readers browse from. The original address is never written to disk.
PDF links are generated on demand and expire after ten minutes. They are issued to you personally. A link that has expired cannot be revived, which is deliberate: it means a link forwarded by accident stops working.
Who else sees it
We do not sell, rent or trade your information, and we do not share it with other researchers or institutions. It reaches the following services only because the portal cannot run without them:
- Supabase — the database, hosted in Mumbai, India.
- Cloudflare R2 — storage for the scans. The bucket is private; there are no public file URLs.
- Vercel — hosting for the website itself.
- Resend — delivers your sign-in code by email.
- Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity — usage measurement, as described above.
We will also disclose information where an Indian court or a law properly requires it of us.
How long we keep it
- Sign-in codes: deleted every night once used or expired. They are valid for a few minutes.
- Your account and profile: for as long as you keep the account. Sessions do not time out — you stay signed in until you sign out or clear your browser.
- Download records: retained as the access log for copyrighted material. These survive the deletion of an account in anonymised form, because their purpose is to record that an edition was accessed.
Your rights
Write to us and we will act on any of the following. We do not charge for it and we do not require a reason.
- A copy of everything the portal holds about you.
- Correction of anything that is wrong.
- Deletion of your account and profile.
- Withdrawal of consent, which means closing your account.
You can edit or clear your profile fields yourself at any time from your profile page.
Under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 the trust must name a person to receive these requests. TO BE SUPPLIED: grievance officer name
Contact
Questions about this policy, or a request under it, go to patrika@sgpt.in.
Samyakgyan Prachar-Prasar Trust, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. TO BE SUPPLIED: registered postal address and trust registration number