Study changes to the Constitution of India within minutes

Look

The Constitution is not a monolith document. It is broken down into articles and schedules. These articles are further categorized into chapters. An amendment is made by a Prime Minister in a certain year and targets specific articles. In each amendment, some parts of each article were added, removed or changed.

See

The nature of constitutional amendments have not been uniform throughout its collection of articles. While some articles/ schedules in the Constitution have seen a lot of changes being introduced over the last 6 decades, some articles remain relatively untouched. 

Imagine

The Constitution of India is the supreme law of the land. It governs every aspect of our lives, similar to the Edicts of Ashoka. The Edicts of Ashoka were inscribed in stone where the inscriptions proclaim Ashoka’s adherence to the Buddhist philosophy which, as in Hinduism is called dharma or the “Law”. To replicate the feel of the edicts, we wanted to make the visualization as a monolith with the textual content shown in the form of carvings. After researching more, we came across the Ishtar Gate inscriptions that was constructed in 575 BC by order of King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon. We found the below image in Wikipedia and decided to use it as our design inspiration.

On page load, all the articles are shown and a heatmap is overlaid on top of each article’s box. The heatmap is color coded according to the number of times the article has been amended, i.e the articles which are often amended are hot and rest are cool. On the left, we have government terms, ruling party and year merged into one axis and on the right side, we have list of all amendments.

Act

When the reader clicks on an exact article, all amendments and all governments that changed it are highlighted.

When the reader clicks on an exact article, all amendments and all governments that changed it are highlighted.

When the reader clicks on any amendment, the government that brought that amendment and the articles amended in that amendment are highlighted.

Outcome

See it live at https://constitution-of-india.pykih.com/

Within the first year, this visual was seen over 100 thousand times. We received messages from USPS aspirants that the visual was helpful for them to study. 

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