Likewise, the first 20 volumes of the complete works of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar were also on a government web server, and I’m pleased to announce that we have now supplemented that collection with the last six volumes that were not previously available, so that set is now complete.
The collection is much more than books though. There are 129 audio files of Gandhi-ji speaking on All India Radio. For each of those audio files, I extracted the English translation or report from the Collected Works and put that with the item. After listening to the speech, you can read the translation, then click into the Collected Works to see what Gandhi-ji said the next day and the day before that, letting you walk through all his public speeches in the last year of his amazing life.
In addition to Gandhi-ji’s audio files, there are quite a few audio files of Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Professor Radhakrishnan, Saradar Patel, and more.
I’m really pleased that the collection also has all 53 episodes of the 1988 Doordarshan production Bharat Ek Khoj, the history of India as told by Nehru in that fantastic book he wrote while sitting in a jail cell, the Discovery of India.
All 53 episodes have subtitles in English, and we’ve been working with an innovative Bengaluru startup named E-Bhasha Language Services. For six of the episodes—including both of the Gandhi episodes and both of the Ramayana episodes—we now have subtitles not only in English, but also in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and Telugu. Our hope is to get all 53 episodes subtitled this way so the history of India can be available to schoolchildren all across India and around the world.
We have two more resources relating to India.
First, I found 90,000 photographs on the Ministry of Information servers that were publicly viewable, but not in a very convenient way. I pulled all of them in, and took 12,000 of the photos that are of high quality and historical significance and put them on Flickr, sorting them out by catagory. I you want photos of trains, or temples, or rural India, or cricket, or pictures of Nehru and Indira Gandhi when she was a little girl, there they are.
Finally, there is a collection which is the one I have spent the most time on, and that is the technical public safety standards of India, over 19,000 official Indian
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