Legal terminology to be made available in regional languages in searchable format: Law Minister Rijiju

New Delhi [India], November 26 (ANI): Union Law Minister Kiren Rijiju on Saturday said that the government is making efforts to collect legal glossaries published in regional languages, digitise them and make them available to the public in a searchable format.
Addressing the Constitution Day celebrations at the Supreme Court today, the Law Minister said language is becoming a barrier in accessing legal justice as legal terminology is not available in regional languages.
"In a vast country like India where 65 per cent of the total population still lives in rural areas and where the regional and local language is the medium of understanding, language becomes one of the perceived barriers in ensuring universal access to justice of the country when legal material and legal terminology are not available in local language understandable by the common man," said Rijiju.
He said that on multiple occasions Prime Minister Narendra Modi has highlighted the need to encourage local languages in courts to increase the confidence of the common man in the judicial system and to make them feel connected too.
"In this context, I am happy to inform that under the aegis of Law Ministry, the Bar Council of India has constituted Bharatiya Bhasha Samiti, chaired by former Chief Justice of India SA Bobde," the Union Law Minister said.
He said that the committee is listing out words and phrases which are most commonly frequently used in various branches of law.
"The committee, as a first step, is listing out words and phrases which are most commonly frequently used in various branches of law for developing a common core vocabulary close to all Indian languages for translating legal material into regional languages," said Rijiju.
"Legislative Department has prepared a glossary of 65,000 legal terms. We plan to digitise and make it available to the public in a searchable format. Efforts will be made to collect legal glossaries published in regional languages, digitise and make it available to the public in the searchable format," said Rijiju.
Rijiju pointed out that the founding fathers placed immense responsibility on the countrymen.
"Apt to recall the words of Babasaheb Dr BR Ambedkar when he cautioned us by saying, let's not forget that this independence has thrown on us great responsibilities, by an independence we have lost the excuse of blaming the British for anything going wrong," he said.
The day has been celebrated as Constitution Day since 2015, to commemorate the adoption of the Constitution of India by the Constituent Assembly in 1949, as per an official press release.
During the programme, the Prime Minister also launched various new initiatives under the e-court project. The Project is an effort to provide services to litigants, lawyers and the judiciary through ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) enablement of courts.
The initiatives launched by the Prime Minister today include Virtual Justice Clock, JustIS mobile App 2.0, Digital court and S3WaaS Websites.
"Virtual Justice Clock is an initiative to exhibit vital statistics of the justice delivery system at the Court level giving the details of the cases instituted, cases disposed and pendency of cases on a day/week/month basis at the Court level. The effort is to make the functioning of the courts accountable and transparent by sharing with the public the status of case disposals by the court. The public can access the Virtual Justice Clock of any court establishment on the District Court's website," read a statement.
JustIS Mobile App 2.0 is a tool available to judicial officers for effective court and case management by monitoring the pendency and disposal of not only his court but also individual judges working under them. This App is also made available to High Court and Supreme Court Judges who can now monitor the pendency and disposal of all the States and Districts under their jurisdiction.
The digital court is an initiative to make court records available to the judge in digitised form to enable the transition to Paperless Courts.
S3WaaS Website is a framework to generate, configure, deploy and manage websites for publishing specified information and services related to district judiciary. S3WaaS is a cloud service developed for government entities to generate Secure, Scalable and Sugamya (Accessible) websites. It is multilingual, citizen-friendly and divyang friendly. (ANI)