CJI announces access to verdicts in some scheduled languages from Republic Day

New Delhi: Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud on Wednesday launched a Supreme Court service, which will start providing top court’s judgments in various Indian scheduled languages from Republic Day.

The Chief Justice, as the bench assembled to conduct the day’s proceedings, told the lawyers that a part of the electronic-Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) project will be operationalized to make judgments available in some scheduled languages from Thursday, which will be free to access.

The judgments will be available on the apex court website, its mobile app and on the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG).

Chief Justice Chandrachud said, “We have the e-SCR (project), which now has nearly 34,000 judgments and an elastic search facility”.

He added that 1,091 judgments in regional languages will be launched on the Republic Day and emphasized that the apex court is on a “mission” in connection with availability of all judgments in scheduled languages.

The Chief Justice said they have 52 in Tamil, 21 in Oriya, 4 in Punjabi, 17 in Kannada, 14 in Marathi, 4 in Assamese, 29 in Malayalam, 3 in Nepali, 28 in Telugu, 3 in Urdu etc.

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.

Earlier this month, the apex court announced the launch of the e-SCR project to provide free access to nearly 34,000 judgments to lawyers, law students, and the public.

The apex court, in a press release, had said, “Supreme Court has developed a search engine with the help of NIC, Pune comprising an elastic search technique in the database of e-SCR. 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 options. The inbuilt elastic search facilitates quick and user-friendly search results”.

It added this project would create an invaluable resource as the entire gamut of judgments from the inception of the Supreme Court in the year 1950 till date would be available on e-SCR and digital repository.

“As the Judiciary is aligning more with technology, the e-SCR project is an important stepping stone for the future of the modern Indian Judiciary and entails manifold benefits, including those of reduction in the burden of travelling and browsing through huge volumes of journals in libraries, as also for enhancing its accessibility to those with visual disabilities, as they may now be able to access them through their screen reading software”, said the release.