The Evolution of Gazette of India

The subject matter of this book is the Gazette of India, which is an authorised legal document published by the Department of Publication, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India. This public journal, which is a weekly publication, prints official notices of the government. After reading the title many may question if this is even a subject worth writing. I would argue, 'I am writing on this simply because no one else has written on this subject. Also, probably no funding agency in this country would ever think of a project of this sort. Many government. institutions such as the Central Secretariat Library (CSL), the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), the Ministry of Finance, the National Archives of India (NAI) and the National Library of India have a sizeable collection of the Gazette of India, and the volumes tend to occupy precious shelf space in densely populated office buildings. The bulky volumes of the gazette look like umns of old ephemera. Their ubiquitous presence in prominent libraries, which I visit often, inspired me to write on this unusual subject. Writers are generally motivated by the world they find themselves in. The volumes of the gazette that I come across in the corridors of these libraries influenced me to write on this subject.

The Gazette of India is a firsthand source of government information. It is referred to occasionally, and therefore can be classified, as a reference material. Generally, at any given point of time, such materials are useful in pieces and not as a whole. Information is extracted from the original gazette, sliced and rearranged. The arrangement of entries in the Gazette of India is done chronologically under broad categorisations, so that users can retrieve them easily. The word 'user' is important here most books have readers, but reference books have users."!

This book provides a retrospective view of the gazette. It is not correct to say that a writer should not look backwards. In fact, writers are encouraged to look backwards if the exercise is based on proper historical awareness and a good understanding of the subject. As the writer of this book, my task here is continual sifting and winnowing of entries from a loosely assembled newssheet.

Regular users of the gazette are officials who consult it to get certain authentic facts and figures. Many a time extracts from the gazette are used as supporting document in the correspondence part of an office file. Lawyers also use this source as evidence or proof in the court of law. But, till date, academicians and researchers have not made any serious effort to extract research and reference material from this publication. The reason is that useful academic contents from the gazette are usually reproduced in secondary sources like monographs, handbooks or compendia.

The gazette is a collection of official orders or regulations; whereas reference sources such as a dictionary, an encyclopaedia, an atlas, or a legal code are meant for distillation of knowledge. A good encyclopaedia explains a topic or a term to remove doubts from our mind. However, today, Wikipedia or dictionary.com, Google map and smart phones have mostly taken over the role of these traditional reference sources. The gazette mainly contains a record of the government's decisions that concerned officials as well as citizens at large need to know. Since it also contains full versions of the Acts and Bills or work done by legislative wings, to a large extent, it contributes to 'knowledge creation' in the society.

**Contents and Sample Pages**