In a first, the Supreme Court has decided to make available judgments into regional languages. To start with , the judgments will be translated into four languages — Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati and Odia.
Speaking at the inauguration of Delhi High Court's Online e- Inspection Software, Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud said on Tuesday ” English is not a comprehensible language to 99.99 per cent of the citizens” in the country.
The CJI said the apex court will operationalise the part of the electronic-Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) project for making available verdicts in some scheduled languages free of cost.
"We have the e-SCR (PROJECT), which now has nearly 34,000 judgments and an elastic search facility. We also now have 1,091 judgments in regional languages which will be launched tomorrow on the Republic Day," the CJI said.
"We have 21 in Odia, 14 in Marathi, four in Assamese... 17 in Kannada... 29 in Malayalam, three in Nepali, four in Punjabi, 52 already in Tamil, 28 in Telugu, and three in Urdu," he said, adding that the apex court was on "a mission" to provide its judgments in all scheduled languages.
The Chief Justice has constituted a committee headed by Justice AS Oka for translation of top court's judgments into regional languages. .
Besides Justice Oka, the committee consists of Justice Suraj Govindaraj of Karnataka High Court;- Sharmistha from National Informatics Centre; - Mitesh Kapra from IIT Delhi; - Vivek Raghavan from Ek step foundation; - Supriya Shankaran from Agami.
"I have constituted a committee chaired by Justice AS Oka, a dynamic judge of the Supreme Court, and the first step taken is to ensure that the Supreme Court judgments will at least be translated in four languages; Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati and Oria," the CJI said. There are 22 languages in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution including Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Bodo, Santhali, Maithili and Dogri. The verdicts, as part of the e-SCR project, are available on the apex court website, its mobile app and on the judgment portal of the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG).
The top court, on January 2, had announced the launch of the electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) project to provide free access to its about 34,000 judgments to lawyers, law students and the common public.
"This is a free service available for lawyers across the country. Young juniors do not have to pay. There is an elastic search facility. We are improving upon the search engine by incorporating the following, distinguished and incorporated judgments in a few weeks..," the CJI had said.
Lawyers, while arguing in courts, refer to the reported judgments supporting their matters by using law journals including the 'Supreme Court Reports'.
The Electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) project was an initiative to provide the digital version of the apex court's judgments in the manner as they are reported in the official law report – 'Supreme Court Reports'.
The Supreme Court has developed a search engine with the help of the National Informatics Centre comprising elastic search technique in database of e-SCR and the search facility in e-SCR provides for free text search, search within search, case type and case year search, judge search, year and volume search and bench strength search.