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This chapter outlines current developments in Indian libraries, information services and cultural sector collectively highlighting recent trends and developments as India increasingly takes centre stage in the area of libraries and information literacy development. The chapter also provides a critical analysis of library and information science education in India and highlights the need for government strategies and policies related to public libraries. Some 17 federal states and union territories in the Republic of India have no public library legislation and therefore low literacy rates. India needs public awareness campaigns, civic engagement and community developments including the grass-roots empowerment of public libraries. Financial reforms, modernization and federal funding strategies for public libraries are also required to energize cultural organizations and national libraries. A recent major development is the establishment of a National Commission on Libraries following recommendations by the National Knowledge Commission. However, Indian public libraries do not cater sufficiently for the growing youth population or other strata's of Indian society. The growing Indian higher education sector also necessitates information policies for open access, digital preservation and repositories development.

This chapter compares a ‘deific decree’ insanity case with constitutional originalism debates as a way to understand the boundaries of the legal person and the nature of law. The criminal defendant who claims innocence on the ground that ‘God told me to’ does not embody a conflict between law and religion, but a conflict between law’s demand for intersubjectivity and the subjectivity of a ‘higher truth known only to me’. In the same way, the originalist interpreter of the constitution rejects precedent in favour of a higher truth that need not be ‘like’ anything before. One approach to broaching this conflict between law and revelation is to understand law’s domain as temporal and incomplete – to imagine a humble rather than absolute law. On this view, the person is also not ‘absolute subjectivity’, but is compelled by legal fidelity to treat like alike and therefore under an obligation to imagine a ‘me’ as ‘we’. Or, to put it another way, to bring the person and the law into relationship is to reject a ‘revelatory’ interpretation of ‘original’ or ‘divine’ law in favour of an incompletely intersubjective common law that links me to we through customs and time. At the same time, by acknowledging law’s incompleteness, we can see unreasonable revelation sometimes as a possibility and not always as an insanity.