Chennai: Tamil Nadu govt has ordered the High-Level Committee on Union-State Relations headed by Justice Joseph Kurian to cancel the exclusive copyright it had given to Bloomsbury, to publish Part-I of its report submitted in the assembly in Feb 2026. The hardbound version of the English version of the report, priced at Rs 799, was hosted online for sale.The govt has also asked the committee to upload it to the public domain and grant open access to everyone immediately to ensure transparency. The order, issued by the public (law and order-F) department on July 30, comes two days after a guest article in TOI, questioned how the ‘public document’, prepared in Tamil and English, could be given to a private entity – Bloomsbury Publishing India Private Limited – instead of being made available free in public domain.The Tamil version, however, was available in the public domain from the date it was submitted in the assembly. A day after the July 29 report, the home department issued an order ratifying the committee’s decision to grant “open access, free of charge, to any publisher who comes forward to publish Part-l of the report either as a whole or in part to ensure wider dissemination of the Tamil version of the report”.As for the English version of the report, the govt directed the committee “to grant open access by hosting the English version of Part-l report of the High Level Committee on Union-State Relations also in public domain immediately to ensure transparency and to cancel the exclusive copyright provided on the English version of the Part-l report of the High Level Committee on Union-State Relations, by following the due procedure of Law”.
