The Supreme Court has released the first set of the copies of its judgments in seven vernacular languages, including Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. This comes as a part of the court’s initiative to make available the copies of judgments in the regional languages of India. While the first copies of the judgements in Kannada and Telugu were made available on Wednesday, 2 judgements in Tamil were uploaded on Thursday.
Earlier in July, the Supreme Court had announced that it will be reproducing its judgments in regional languages. It had also announced that these regional language translations of its verdicts will be made available for download for the general public from the end of July. The English copies are currently available for download on the same day of the verdict and the regional translations would be made available in a week’s time.
The order copies in regional languages can be downloaded from the ‘Vernacular Judgments’ tab of the website.
The Supreme Court’s announcement in the first week of July had sparked some controversy in Tamil Nadu since Tamil was not one of the languages in which the order copies were to be released. The initial announcement stated that the order copies will be translated into six languages – Assamese, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Odia and Telugu. The idea was to help litigants understand the order and to gradually reduce their dependence on their lawyers to explain the judgments to them. The idea, which was mooted by the President of India Ram Nath Kovind in 2017, was approved by Chief Justice of India recently.
In Tamil Nadu, the leaders demanded that translated versions of order copies be made available in Tamil also. Villupuram MP D Ravikumar wrote to Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, urging him to include Tamil in the list of languages in which judgments would be translated to. Leader of the Opposition in Tamil Nadu and DMK President MK Stalin also called for the inclusion of Tamil in the list of languages. As of Thursday, two cases are available in Tamil on the website and more may be added soon.