The Parliament Digital Library: free to read, not free to copy

The Parliament Digital Library, run by the Lok Sabha Secretariat, lets anyone read digitised parliamentary debates going back to 1854, and it is free, but the items carry a copyright notice, so reading is open and reuse is not. Imagine the Constituent Assembly's arguments over each article of the Constitution sitting in a searchable archive instead of a basement. The historical collection covers the old Legislative Councils, the Legislative Assembly and Council of State, the Constituent Assembly (both the draft-making sessions of 1946 to 1950 and the legislative sessions of 1947 to 1949), and the Provisional Parliament up to 1952. Presidential addresses, budget speeches and committee reports are there as well. If you want to know what the framers meant by a provision, the draft-making debates are the place to look, though some single-day files run past 100 MB, so be patient on a slow connection. You can enter through the Knowledge Centre on sansad.in or through the library's own site.

Citation: 'Parliament Digital Library: About Us' (Lok Sabha Secretariat) https://eparlib.sansad.in/about_us.jsp; 'Knowledge Centre: Introduction' (Lok Sabha) https://sansad.in/ls/knowledge-centre/introduction both accessed 18 October 2026.