Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud on Wednesday announced that top court’s judgements in various Indian scheduled languages would now be made available on Republic Day.

As the bench led by the CJI assembled to conduct the day’s proceedings, he told the lawyers that a part of the electronic-Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) project will be operationalised to make judgements available in some scheduled languages from Thursday. This will be free to access service.

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

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

According to a statement, on the occasion of the 74th Republic Day, the Registry of Supreme Court would release translation of 1268 judgments in different Indian languages. The translated versions of some Supreme Court judgements are being made available in thirteen Indian languages Assamese, Garo, Hindi, Kannada, Khasi, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

"To begin with a translation of 1268 judgements i.e. 1091 Hindi, 21 Odia, 14 Marathi, 4 Assamese, 1 Garo, 17 Kannada, 1 Khasi, 29 Malayalam, 3 Nepali, 4 Punjabi, 52 Tamil, 28 Telugu and 3 Urdu; are being made available at the e-SCR portal. The portal which is the repository of the electronic version of Supreme Court Reports (SCR), the official publication of Supreme Court of India now has some new features in it," the statement said.

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 had launched the e-SCR project to provide free access to nearly 34,000 judgments to lawyers, law students, and the general public.