How Government Plans To Promote Hindi And Other Indian Languages In Legal Education And Court Proceedings

The Ministry of Law and Justice is working on enhancing and promoting the use of Hindi and other Indian languages in legal education and court proceedings, the Parliament was told on Friday (17 March).

The National Education Policy 2020 recommends state institutions offering law education to consider offering bilingual education for future lawyers and judges in English and in the language of the state in which the Institution is situated.

"This Ministry of Law and Justice is emphasising to promote and enhance use of Hindi and other regional languages in Legal Education and for conducting proceedings of the Supreme Court/High Courts and other judicial fora," Union Minister Kiren Rijiju said in a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha.

The ministry is also digitising a 65,000 words legal glossary and working on creating an online platform for coining legal terminology in Indian languages.

The platform will be used to crowd–source the coining of legal terminology for Indian Languages.

Further, the ministry is in the process to "identify frequently used words in the legal documents and creating a transitive vocabulary/common core vocabulary by coining words from common roots which would be adaptable by all the Indian languages so that the translation of legal documents from one Indian language to another Indian language would be easier", the minister said.

To further the regional language initiative, the ministry plans to convene a meeting of Vice Chancellors of Law Universities, representatives of Bar and Judiciary to prepare a Ten Year Perspective action Plan for Promotion of Indian Languages in Courts and Legal Education.

In addition, the Bar Council of India has constituted a committee under the chairmanship of retired Chief Justice of India S A Bobde to recommend measures to enhance the use of Hindi and other regional languages in legal education.