Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud on Wednesday announced in open court that the Supreme Court will release 1,268 judgments in 13 Indian languages on Republic Day in a bid to make justice administration more accessible to the common man.
“To begin with, we have translated 1,091 judgments to Hindi, 21 in Odia, 14 Marathi, four Assamese, one Garo, 17 Kannada, one Khasi, 29 Malayalam, three Nepali, four Punjabi, 52 Tamil, 28 Telugu and three Urdu,” the CJI addressed the courtroom as soon as the Bench assembled for the day’s work.
The judgments would be made available in the court’s e-SCR portal. The portal which is the repository of the electronic version of Supreme Court Reports (SCR), the official publication of Supreme Court of India, now has some new features in it. When a user uses the free text search engine in e-SCR portal and enters any keyword in the search box, the relevant judgments would be displayed in English language as reported in SCR and also display the list of Indian languages in which that particular judgment is available.
A statement said the work of translation of Supreme Court judgments in Indian languages was a continuous process and the translated versions would be uploaded on regular basis for the benefit of the users.
The CJI said the court was on a mission mode to translate its judgments from the official English language to the various regional languages.
“We are on a mission to provide Supreme Court judgements in all scheduled languages. We have already started,” the CJI observed.
This is a major step by the Supreme Court towards digitalisation. Of late, the court’s newly launched electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) project provides free access and elastic search facility to about 34,000 of its judgments. The move has benefitted law students, young lawyers who cannot afford expensive books which record apex court judgments and even the public.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had recently lauded Chief Justice Chandrachud’s efforts to provide judgments in regional languages and for digitalisation of the court.
