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The judgments were passed by a division bench of Chief Justice S Manikumar and Justice Shaji P Chaly in January 2023 and were made available in Malayalam on the High Court’s website recently.
Ever since Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud took office in November 2023, there has been a collective push from the executive and the judiciary towards publication of judgments of High Courts and the Supreme Court in regional languages.
At around the same time as these judgments were originally issued, the CJI had said that the process of releasing Supreme Court judgments in regional languages had begun.
As a first step towards the same, 1,091 judgments of the top court were released in Odia, Garo and other regional languages on Republic Day.
Speaking at the inauguration of Delhi High Court’s Online e-Inspection Software a day prior, the CJI had informed that a committee headed by Justice AS Oka was constituted for translation of top court’s judgments into four languages – Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati and Odia.
Besides Justice Oka, the committee has the following members:
– Justice Suraj Govindaraj of Karnataka High Court;
– Sharmistha from National Informatics Centre;
– Mitesh Kapra from IIT Delhi;
– Vivek Raghavan from Ek step foundation;
– Supriya Shankaran from Agami.
The CJI, who has also been the head of the Supreme Court E-Committee for several years, also said that a software is being developed by which machine learning will be used to translate Supreme Court judgments into various Indian languages.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi too has been appreciative of the judiciary’s focus on making judgments more accessible to citizens who may not be well versed in English.
“At a recent function, the Hon’ble CJI Justice DY Chandrachud spoke of the need to work towards making SC judgments available in regional languages. He also suggested the use of technology for it. This is a laudatory thought, which will help many people, particularly youngsters,” the PM tweeted on January 22.
The Kerala High Court has now become the first High Court in the country to take a step towards this goal.
