Framing of India's constitution c.2

A proposal for a comprehensive study of India's Constitution based on much hitherto uncoordinated material in the form of notes, reports, memoranda and other relevant documents originated in 1961 with my predecessor (as Director of the Indian Institute of Public Administration), Professor V. K. N. Menon. His scheme implied the publication in intelligible sequence of all the available source material and of an interpretative account of important provisions of the Constitution. Such a study, it was felt, would be of general interest to students of India's Constitution and furnish research workers in particular with adequate material on which further study could be undertaken on various aspects of the Constitution.

Professor Menon pursued this proposal with his customary energy. Already in 1960, B. Shiva Rao, who was a member of the Constituent Assembly, had prepared the groundwork through a volume containing the papers and memoranda written by B. N. Rau, Constitutional Adviser to the Constituent Assembly. In a foreword to this volume, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, the President of the Assembly and later of the Indian Union, had observed that it "underlined the urgent need for further research to bring together the scattered mass of material and data which influenced and shaped thinking in the Constituent Assembly and (gave) to our Constitution its present form and content". Such research, he had pointed out, was "necessary, not only for the study of contemporary politics, but for a full understanding by future generations of our Constitution and of the interplay of social forces and attitudes behind the prosaic work of legal draftsmanship".