CHENNAI: The three-member committee headed by former Supreme Court Judge Kurian Joseph, appointed by Tamil Nadu government to examine centre-state relations, has decided to file its report in three volumes instead of two parts as decided earlier by incorporating contemporary issues such as digital governance. The tenure of the panel may also be extended by six to seven months, sources said.
Speaking to the TNIE, retired IAS officer and former vice-chancellor of Maritime University, Ashok Vardhan Shetty, one of the members of the panel, said that it has been decided to expand the report from the initially planned 24 chapters to 30.
“We decided that the earlier terminology of interim and final report was not appropriate. Instead, we will bring out a trilogy, like three parts with 10 chapters each,” Shetty said.
Part One of the report, published in February, according to Shetty, deals with the controversial issues in the federal framework, including the role of governors, language policy, education, healthcare and the GST.
“The remaining two volumes will cover emerging areas such as climate change, digital governance, and local government structures, which the earlier commissions did not fully address. The three-part report will be the most comprehensive contemporary review of India’s federal architecture,” Shetty said.
The committee, which was scheduled to submit its findings within two years by May 2027, has informed the Tamil Nadu government that its work is likely to continue until December 2027.
The committee has decided to go beyond the suggestions and findings of the previous commissions on centre-state relations, including the Sarkaria Commission and the Punchhi Commission. While the previous commissions took three to five years to complete fewer chapters, the current panel aims to explore more subjects but deliver the report in three parts within a tight deadline of less than three years.
Panel took 3 months to finish report
Explaining the enormity of the process, Ashok said that the first volume alone runs to about 1.2 lakh words in English, with the Tamil version even longer. “It took nearly three months of continuous work of 12 to 14 hours a day to complete the writing after finalising the recommendations,” he said. The panel first spent four months deliberating key issues before arriving at a consensus. The committee also wants to avoid the fate of earlier reports that remained largely inaccessible to public. The panel has printed thousands of copies of its first part and has distributed them to MPs, CMs, judges, governors and bureaucrats across the country.
The English version of the report is being published internationally by Bloomsbury Publishing for wider commercial distribution across the globe. The committee is also planning to translate the report into multiple regional languages, including Hindi, Bengali, and Marathi, for circulation across the country.