Noting that English Language in its 'legal avatar' is not comprehensible to 99.9.% population in the country, CJI DY Chandrachud announced a new AI Software that the Supreme Court will use to translate the judgements and orders in four languages.

The CJI unvieled AI enabled SUVAS - Supreme Court Vidhik Anuvad Software which shall help in translation in four languages- Hindi, Gujarati, Odia and Tamil.

At the launch, he stressed that access to justice cannot be meaningful unless citizens are able to understand in a language, which they speak and comprehend.

The CJI elaborated on the same:

“A very important initiative which we have adopted recently, is our initiative for translation of the judgments of the Supreme Court in regional languages. Because we must understand that the language which we use namely English, is a language which is not comprehensible, particularly in its legal avatar, to 99.9% of our citizens, in which case really access to justice cannot be meaningful, unless citizens are able to access and understand in a language which they speak and comprehend, the judgments which we deliver whether in the high courts or in the Supreme Court"

Speaking at the inaugural function of the software that will allow e-inspection of digitised judicial files of the Delhi High Court, CJI Chandrachud said it is just the beginning.

He informed that the operations will be supervised by a committee chaired by Justice Abhay Oka.

“Now our mission for this is that every High Court should have a committee of two judges, one of whom should be a judge who is drawn from the district judiciary because of their sheer width of experience. Most of them have written judgments in those languages,” CJI added.

He disclosed that the plan is that the High Courts will also appoint their retired judicial officers, apart from their own translators, for verifying machine translation of the Supreme Court judgments.

“We are in the process…there's a software which has been developed. We are now creating a team whereby they will use machine learning for the translation of Supreme Court judgments in various Indian languages,” CJI Chandrachud said.

He stressed that it is really important that the translation accord with what's actually been said in the judgement and that shall be taken care by the retired judges.

He said that they will be remunerated from Supreme Court resources and they can do the task sitting at home.

The CJI requested that members of Delhi High Court Bar Association and younger lawyers to freely utilize eSCR, a software that contains electronic form of old judgments in physical form dating back to 1950.

“The next step for us is to use neutral citations as part of eSCR. The eSCR has an elastic search facility. So not only have we converted our paper files in PDF files, but we have also made them compatible with search engine.”

He informed that in order to maintain a uniform format across the country, he has written to the Chief Justices of all the High Courts to introduce neutral citations across India.

CJI Chandrachud endorsed RTI Portal for each High Court as well to make the process of disclosure of information related to courts under RTI Act, streamlined and accessible.

 

 

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