Chandigarh, March 12 -- Punjab Vidhan Sabha speaker Kultar Singh Sandhwan launched a search engine on Tuesday, enabling public access to 77 years of legislative assembly debates dating back to 1947. The initiative, a first in India, will help citizens, researchers and lawmakers easily access historical debates and proceedings of the Vidhan Sabha.

Sandhwan highlighted that the search engine, developed in collaboration with the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, led by Gurpreet Lehal, professor and consultant, Punjabi University, Patiala, and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Noida, allows users to search debates by topic, language and date range.

He said that Punjab is now the first s...