NEW DELHI: The centre will bring out 75 good quality law textbooks and content in regional languages this year to impart and encourage legal education in the mother tongue.
“We are starting the work to publish law textbooks in regional languages for undergraduate courses. These books will be out by year-end. The idea is that colleges and institutes shouldn’t face any difficulty in imparting legal education to students interested in studying in their mother tongue,” Chamu Krishna Shastry, Chairman of the High Powered Committee for the Promotion of Indian Languages under the Ministry of Education, said.
“Eminent professors will be writing these books in mother tongues for undergraduate courses,” he told The New Indian Express.
“We are starting the work to publish law textbooks in regional languages for undergraduate courses. These books will be out by year-end. The idea is that colleges and institutes shouldn’t face any difficulty in imparting legal education to students interested in studying in their mother tongue,” he said.
Law colleges and institutes can introduce these legal books from the next academic year, Shastry added.
The decision to publish original law books in 13 regional languages was taken at the one-day national workshop on October 14, which the Bhartiya Bhasha Samiti, or the high-powered committee,organised. This high-powered committee has been formed to recommend speedy pathways and action plans for the holistic and multidisciplinary development of Indian languages in the light of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
The workshop was organised in collaboration with Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas, an RSS-affiliated body on education.
Textbooks will be published for 40 subjects identified for UG courses and 20 for PG.
However, it was decided that apart from original books, they will translate not only necessary Acts, statutes and judgments also, a point also raised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 14 at the All India Conference of law ministers and secretaries, where he had stressed that new laws should be written in a clear manner and in regional languages to bring in “ease of justice,” so that even the poor can easily understand them. Legal language doesn’t become a barrier for citizens.
Shastry said the idea behind organising the workshop, which was attended by eminent law professors from 13 states, including Kerala, was to explore the scope for promotion of teaching-learning, proficiency in vocabulary use etc., of Indian languages in legal education.
It was also decided in the workshop to translate reputed textbooks from English to local languages. For this, a tool prepared by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), a national-level council for technical education under the Education Ministry, will be used.
Buddha Chandrasekhar, Chief Coordinating Officer, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), Ministry of Education, who developed this tool, demonstrated it during the workshop. “We aim to use this tool to translate legal texts in local languages,” Shastry said.
Justice L. Narasimha Reddy, former Chief Justice of Patna High Court and former Chairman of the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT), also guided the deliberations.
It was found that in undergraduate courses, students in many states take examinations as well as classes in regional languages. But when they do post-graduation, they prefer English as they plan to practice in higher courts.
The Bar Council of India Rules of Legal Education already allows the study of legal education in local languages. The BCI has already constituted a committee, chaired by Justice S A Bobde, for developing regional languages in legal education in the country. Both University Grants Commission (UGC) Chairman Prof M. Jagadesh Kumar and Shastry are its members.