- The Supreme Court has decided to make its judgments available in regional languages on its official website.
- Under the existing practice, judgements are written in English and subsequently uploaded on the SC website
- The Supreme Court’s verdicts will be made available on its website in Hindi, Telugu, Assamese, Marathi, Kannada, Odia and Tamil
- However, unlike orders written in English that are posted on the website on the day they are passed, the translated versions would be uploaded a week later.
- The rationale behind uploading judgements in regional languages is to enable non-English speaking litigants to check out the status of their cases without having to depend on lawyers.
- To this end, the Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi have formally cleared a software indigenously developed for the purpose by the Supreme Court’s “in-house” electronic software wing. The app is similar to Google’s text translation.
- The move to make Supreme Court judgments multi-lingual is credited to President Ram Nath Kovind who in a 2017 conference held in Kochi, highlighted the need to render judgments in regional languages for the benefit of non-English speakers.
