Part II: Other Research Materials on India

Selected Provisions of the Indian Constitution

An excellent place to start is the India page of Jurist: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/world/india.htm

The Indian Parliament web site has an excellent section on the Constituent Assembly which drafted the Constitution include an on-line text of the debates organized by dates and searchable by key word. The same web site contains the text of the Constitution, organized by section, and searchable by key word, and the texts of all the amendments in chronological order. Of particular interest are the 42nd Amendment, enacted in 1976 as part of Indira Gandhi's Emergency Rule, and the 44th Amendment, enacted in 1978 after the Emergency to restore protection of individual liberties and civil rights to the Constitution. [The Parliament web site had been down for several days as of August 16]

India Code Information System (INCODIS) (http://indiacode.nic.in) contains the full-text of Central Acts of Parliament from 1834 on. Several search options are available. It is not a user-friendly site and if you find that one doesn't work, try another. You might need to use two search methods in conjunction with one another to get to the full-text.

Neither Westlaw nor Lexis have any Indian case or statutory law available. They do, however, have Indian news databases (see below).

Two of the best English-language publications in India are The Times of India and The Hindu. Both have on-line editions and archives and search engines. Both are also available on Westlaw; from the Westlaw homepage, go to the Directory, then International/Worldwide Materials, then India. Westlaw provides a better search engine and larger archive than the on-line editions of either publication. (The Times of India archive only goes back to Jan 1, 2001.) However, looking a few recent issues of either publication on their own web sites will do a lot to give you a feeling for law and politics in India.

The Times of India site is free. [www.timesofindia.com]

The Hindu site is also free. [http://www.hinduonnet.com/]

The People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) can be compared to the ACLU here and have been very active in the Supreme Court--they were the initiators of the Olga Tellis pavement dwellers case, for example, and monitor preventive detention abuses.The web site (http://www.pucl.org/) seeems very organized and well maintained. I suggest you browse through "PUCL in the news" (that will take you to various newspaper articles relating to public interest cases) and the archives for the PUCL Bulletin

An interesting on-line investigative journalism site is:
http://www.tehelka.com/
This is a controversial site in India because its journalists have engaged in some very ambitious sting operations against government officials to reveal corruption.