I will go even to the extent of saying that no Constitution need be perfect. Everything lies in the working of the Constitution. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
As said in the Constituent Assembly by O.V Alagesan, during a discussion on the draft constitution 1.
The working of our institutions, the legislature, the courts and the executive should not be measured solely by their formal interaction with the constitution: making laws, passing bills, their judgments and in the decisions that the executive makes. There are discussions, opposition, debate, statements, orders, notices, circulars that are both formal and informal in nature that make up a significant part of how India functions, from the roots to the top of the branches. The Constitutional Observer seeks to bring together a collection of these records as archives that document the making of our political present and future. This particular repository will track the archiving of Official State Legislature Documents in various forms.
This archive of State Legislatures will over the course of time, include
- documents from the state (and UT) legislative assemblies,
- documents from the state legislative councils (for the states which have chosen to retain the council)
These documents are varied in production, and in availability. Some states make it available in smaller chunks, some only make documentation of full day proceedings available. Listed in order of priority:
- Full day proceedings (includes question hour, debates, motions etc) in the original language
- Full day proceedings in english (the LS and RS make this available)
- Committee Reports
- Papers laid
- Business specific disaggregated reports
Status of each legislature is tracked in assembly_mirror_tracker.csv.
The Constitutional Observer is interested in the discourses that make the political aspects of the country: parliamentry, legislative, speech, news, social media and more. The website https://Constitutional.Observer is a comparative search platform to query and understand such discourses, currently it includes the debates from the Constituent Assembly and Debates from the Lok Sabha from 1985 to 2019.
All documents will be obtained from official domains held by the respective State Legislature websites.
Footnotes
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paragraph identifier: 11.164.141, available to read at https://www.constitutionofindia.net/debates/24-nov-1949/ ↩