The project has been successful after carefully collecting Gandhi’s writings from all over the world and converting them into the digital format.
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The chief architect of the original series of CWMG was Prof. K Swaminathan, who worked on it along with a team of editors. The entire collection took about 38 years in compilation (September 1956 - October 1994) and is over 55,000 pages in length. The editorial team of CWMG got in touch with people who had interacted with Mahatma Gandhi and requested them to submit the letters of correspondence if they have any. Earlier in 2005, the volumes of CWMG were withdrawn after it was detected that about 100 entries are missing from the collection. The missing entries included letters written by Mahatma Gandhi to his German friend Hermann Kallenbach. Following this, a team of experts took up the task of correcting the errors and including all the missing entries. In five years, they went through all of the 100 volumes to find and correct the errors. The restored original volumes were first presented to the Rajya Sabha in the form of Compact Disk (CD). The e-project was led by the publications division of the information and broadcasting ministry with the support of Gujarat Vidyapith in Ahmedabad. It was supervised by a three-member expert committee which included Prof Sudershan Iyengar, former vice chancellor of Gujarat Vidyapith, Dinaben Patel, an eminent Gandhian scholar and Tridip Suhrud, director Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust.The e-versions are now available in the form of DVDs and also on the Mahatma Gandhi Heritage Portal.
The Collected works of #MahatmaGandhi is a treasure that India offers to the world: Shri @arunjaitley pic.twitter.com/D5u6iFWkoY
— PIB India (@PIB_India) September 8, 2015