SC to release more than 1,000 judgments in Indian languages on Republic Day

New Delhi, January 25

The Supreme Court will release more than 1,000 judgments in Indian languages on the Republic Day on Thursday, Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud announced on Wednesday.

“I have some news apart from e-SCR (electronic-Supreme Court Reports) and the 34,000 judgments available, we also now have a number of judgments of the Supreme Court in vernacular languages. It will be released on the occasion of the Republic Day,” CJI Chandrachud said at the beginning of the day’s proceedings.

“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.

The e-SCR project is an initiative to provide the digital version of the top 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.

“We have 21 in Oriya, 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 the top court was on “a mission” to provide its judgements in all scheduled languages.

There are 22 languages in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution—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 will be available on the Supreme Court’s 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 judgements to lawyers, law students and the common public.