Facts on the Indian Constitution

Your school teachers never told you this cool stuff about the Indian Constitution but with Republic Day coming up, you should know it!

1. We wrote the longest Constitution of any free country in the world with approx. 146,000 words in its beta version.

Just for context, the next few long ones from Malaysia, Nigeria & Brazil were drafted to be 60k words long … and the US Constitution was just 7k words, and all of these numbers are now much lower today because of tight editing.

2. But quantity doesn’t mean we don’t have quality.

The main guy behind the Constitution, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, borrowed ideas from Britain, the USA, France, Ireland, Canada, and Australia, also studying 60+ other Constitutions while he wrote ours.

That’s why it’s also called the “Bag of Borrowings.”

3. But this doesn’t mean we just blindly copied everything.

In a world without Google Docs between 1948 when the first draft was presented by B.N. Rau & 1950 when the Constitution finally came into force, there were 7,635 proposed edits or as we call them “amendments.” All of this cost ₹6.4 million.

4. The reason the Constitution is linked to the 26th Jan is that in 1947, even though we gained independence from British rule, we were called the Dominion of India as a crown colony under the British Commonwealth, meaning we still accepted the British as the monarch Head of the State & had links to their Constitution.

In 1950, when the Constitution came into effect, we declared ourselves as a sovereign state with our own laws & democratically elected heads - which is why we now are the Republic of India.