The Parliament Digital Library (PDL) has been developed for the convenience of the Hon’ble Members and Citizens at large to enable them access parliamentary documents anytime anywhere. The total collection includes digitized documents covering a period of nearly 170 years comprising of approx. 50 lakh digital pages of significant source of information on various resources viz. Debate Proceedings, Historical Debates, Parliament Questions and Answers, Parliament Committee Reports, Bulletins, Resume of Lok Sabha and selected Publications of Lok Sabha. The visitor count of more than 2.92 crore in the last five years signifies the impact of growth, development and rigorous exploration of the Parliament Digital Library invigorated under the dynamic leadership and guidance of the Lok Sabha Speaker, Shri Om Birla during 2019-2024. As on date a total of 12,88,103 digital documents [full text and tagged files title wise] in PDF format along with metadata are available on PDL and Digital Sansad website.

During last five years, Hon’ble Speaker has laid continuous emphasis on completion of the exercise of intensive metadata creation and tagging of parliamentary debates which in turn has enabled Members and Citizens at large to find the required information from the Knowledge Centre of the website. The latest Artificial Intelligence tools have been used for extracting the data which facilitated the faster completion of Metadata creation task. The processing of digitization of debate proceedings from 1st to 17th Lok Sabha has been completed. Latest OCR technologies for better search in Hindi version content are being implemented with the aid of CDAC, Noida for enabling better search. The collection wise details are as follows:

I. Historical Debates: The treasured Historical debates (full text) of 5032 dates from 1854-1952 are part of this portal.

(a) Indian Legislative Council Debates (1854-1920)

(b) Legislative Assembly Debates (1921-1947)

(c) Council of State Debates (1921-1946)

(d) Constituent Assembly of India (Draft Making 1946-1950)

(e) Constituent Assembly of India (Legislative) (1947-1949)

(f) Provisional Parliament Debates (1950-1952).

II. Parliamentary Documents: 13441 digital documents covering Presidential Addresses to Parliament (1947 to 2024); Budget Speeches, General and Railways (1947 onwards; Resume of work done by Lok Sabha; Bulletin Part I and II ; Reports of various Parliamentary Committees viz. Financial Committees, Departmentally Related Standing Committees and other Committees since inception are part of this collection.

III. Publications: 566 important publications of LSS, comprising 247 books; 241 Periodicals and 78 Information Bulletins are part of this collection.

IV. Lok Sabha Debates: The digitized copy of Lok Sabha debates of each days sitting from 1st to 17th Lok Sabha, in various available versions from 1952 to 2024 are placed here in following collections for browsing by Lok Sabha Number, Title, Date and language versions:

Text of Debates:

(a) 1st to 7th Lok Sabha -Full Text digitized from Printed Original version

(b) 8th to 14th Lok Sabha -Full Text digitized from Printed English version

(c) 15th to 17th Lok Sabha -Full Text digitized from digital born Original version

Text of Debates (English)
8th to 14th Lok Sabha - Full Text digitized from Printed English version

Text of Debates (Hindi)
1st to 16th Lok Sabha - Full Text Hindi Version

Text of Debates (Uncorrected)
17th Lok Sabha (14th session onward) - Full Text Original Version (Uncorrected)

V. Debate by Title/Members: The portal also provides 12,54,123 digitized contents of categorized Debates and Questions by titles/members/debate type/question type/ministry wise from 1st to 17th Lok Sabha (1952-2024). Participation of PM in Proceedings (1000 speeches in English and Hindi) have been highlighted. (Part I - 11,23,997 files, Part II - 1,29,124 files).

A new Parliament Library digitization project is ongoing with an aim at systematic expansion of Parliament Library's collection in digital format. The type of collections are Rare books, Sanskrit old books, State Papers, Correspondences, old Census Reports, Registers, Papers Laid etc. The project has started in January 2023 and the access to digitized content is expected to be made available in batches from July 2024 onwards.

The vision of Hon’ble Speaker (HS) has enabled the creation of “Knowledge Centre” as a one stop solution to access all the digital data of collections at one place on “sansad.in” website at “https://sansad.in/ls/knowledge-centre/collections” and “https://eparlib.nic.in/”. It is an eco-friendly tool and a boon for legislators and common man in participative democracy.

The “Single Member Committee to monitor Digitization and Microfilming of Parliamentary Proceedings and documents and to transform Parliament Library into Digital Library” headed by Shri Dinesh Trivedi w.e.f. April, 2022 is inspiring to achieve Hon’ble Speaker’s vision of technology involvement for accessibility of data for growth and development. The Digitization Unit can be contacted at 011-23034060 and 011-23035481. The email address of the branch is:- digitizationplb-lss@sansad.nic.in.

The ongoing Digitization processes will eventually save the time of reader/user and every user will find maximum availability of parliamentary and other documents at one click for gaining knowledge anywhere anytime.