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Evidence1950

The Constitution comes into force

Parliament House, New Delhi

SansadBhavan
SansadBhavan. Bill Strong from Melbourne, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

On 26 January India becomes a sovereign democratic republic; its constitution, drafted under B. R. Ambedkar, is the world's longest.

The Constituent Assembly adopted the text on 26 November 1949, and it came into force two months later, on the anniversary of the Purna Swaraj day of 1930. Article 1: India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.

The First Schedule sorted those states into four parts, A to D: former British provinces, former princely states and their unions, smaller centrally run states, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. That list is what the next pins rewrite.

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