The document covers two broad areas. The first concerns the individual: daily discipline, the prescribed recitations, and the personal conduct expected of an initiated Sikh. The second concerns the corporate: the conduct of a gurdwara, the treatment of the Guru Granth Sahib, the running of the kitchen open to all, and the form of the ceremonies at birth, initiation, marriage and death.
Within each, the text states what is required and what is not permitted. Its authority in practice comes from the institutions that adopted it rather than from the text alone, and Sikh bodies worldwide cite it as the reference point when a question of correct practice arises. That includes questions its drafters could not have anticipated, which is a normal condition for any code and not a defect in this one. The atlas records that the code exists, who approved it, when it was published and what areas it governs. It does not set out the observances themselves as instruction, because this is a living discipline belonging to the community that keeps it, and describing a practice and prescribing one are different acts with different obligations attached. A reader who needs the text itself should go to the community's own publication of it, which is issued by the body that approved it and is available in English as well as in Punjabi.