Why India needs a Simple Language Commission?

In India, there is Department of Hindi under the Ministry of Home Affairs in the Central government. The department has been given the responsibility of spreading Hindi across the country. It recruits those who have done an MA in Hindi. It is officially called Rajbhasha Vibhag.

In India English too is a Rajbhasha (official language). But no efforts are made to recruit MAs in English to help out in drafting laws, rules, regulations and directives from the government in a comprehensible language.

As a result, the language of the laws of India remains incomprehensible, even to those who draft it. The best example for this can be the bill which sought the withdrawal of special status to Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370. The bill was full of spelling and grammatical mistakes. This resulted in government releasing a corrected version after a month the parliament had passed the bill.

The intention behind the law may be good but it requires the wisdom of the honourable courts of justice to make sense of whatever was written in the law.

The Indian government hence must consider appointing a “Simple Language Commission”. The government must begin framing laws with no convolutions and legalese, one that even a 10th-pass can comprehend (which by the way is 90 per cent of the all the workers in the organised and unorganised sector in India). The government must also ensure that no rule, law, directive should be issued by the government unless it is written in a simple, commonsensical language.

Topics: GS-II: Salient Features Significant Provisions of Constitution