Plain language in India: Developments, challenges, and the way ahead

I first heard about plain language in my journalism college from my professor, Jyoti Sanyal. He had worked long years at The Statesman where he wrote what is still perhaps the country’s only newspaper stylebook, Write it Right. Most Indian newspapers only have stylesheets.

Sanyal later published the gist of the stylebook in the form of a book, Indlish.

He went on to found Clear English India in Kolkata, an organization committed to furthering the cause of plain language. This was in 2006.

Clear English India (CEI) was formed with the help of a grant Sanyal received from Martin Cutts of the Plain Language Commission. CEI worked with one of the leading private sector banks of the country to simplify its text and customer forms. We were, of course, asked to stay off the legal disclaimer text. It was a battle half lost that way, yet we soldiered on. Sanyal designed and ran some training workshops in plain language for the bank’s staff.

The bank was our star and sole client for nearly 2.5 years. However, despite our many efforts, we got no breakthroughs elsewhere.

I worked with Sanyal at CEI for as long as he was alive. After he passed away in 2008, the organization didn’t last much longer.

And that was the last I heard about any plain language venture in India. Sanyal had mentioned that there were a couple of other individuals in India who were familiar with the concept and had tried to do something about it. But that was it. As far as I know, there was no other concerted effort in India to bring plain language to the people.

Personally, plain language as a career option simply folded up with Sanyal’s death and the closing of CEI. I moved on to other writing jobs.

A couple of years ago, I resumed my plain language career. I decided to investigate the developments in plain language in India. Here’s what I found out:

Plain language developments in India

Jyoti Sagar, a Delhi-based lawyer, has been an advocate of plain legal drafting. In an article for The Wire, he says, “...the idea of moving to a more contemporary style of simple language has not been explored [in India]. The same applies to our commercial contracts and documents.”

Sandeep Dave was one of the people Jyoti Sanyal was in touch with or had heard of when he floated CEI. Dave, a lawyer, was Clarity’s India representative in the early 2000s’. He used to maintain the Global Law Review, which focused on “India law and international resources,” according to this website. But the link to Global Law Review doesn’t work any more.

The Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy created a Manual on Plain Language Drafting [pdf] in 2017. The manual provides guidelines on legislative drafting by using examples from Indian laws. It not only talks about jargon and obsolete words to avoid, but also comments on how the very structure of the bill can be made more reader-friendly.

Nyaaya was incubated at Vidhi. It offers “simple, actionable, recallable and authoritative legal information to young Indians”. Plain language is not on the explicit agenda of the organization, but explaining Indian laws is. The explainers are available in English, Hindi and Kannada.

Rajeev Satav, a member of Parliament, moved a plain language bill [pdf] in 2018. The bill called for the setting up of a drafting agency, which would, “...eliminate any ambiguity or confusion by clearly clarifying the intended meaning of each law.”

The bill further said, “The principle of Rule of Law presupposes that those who are affected by a law should be in a position to ascertain its meaning and effect. Therefore, plain language drafting is the need of the hour to facilitate strengthening the rule of law and ensure better accessibility & participation of the citizens of the country.”

Unfortunately, Satav recently died of Covid.

Last year Subhash Vijayran, a lawyer in Delhi, filed a public interest litigation (PIL) at the Supreme Court. He asked the Supreme Court to make the use of plain language mandatory in the drafting of laws. In his petition, he said, “The writing of most lawyers is: (1) wordy, (2) unclear, (3) pompous and (4) dull.” One of the things he talked about was the introduction of a plain language drafting course for law students.

It seems he got the attention of the Supreme Court as well as its sympathy. “You should also say, if this isn’t done, people will stop reading the laws and judgements,” Vijayran recalls the bench telling him. The judges then issued a notice to the government. The case was to be heard in December 2020. No update on the hearing is available online.

The Supreme Court could not understand a judgement by the Himachal Pradesh High Court. It sent it back to the High Court for re-drafting for clarity. Now that is something, isn’t it, for the judges to get some of their own medicine?

Justice Yathindra Singh, a retired Chief Justice of the Chhattisgarh High Court, wrote an article on “Cultivating plain language in law”. He talks of how he was fascinated by the “complicated and obscure language of the legal world” as a young lawyer. But he eventually got over it and realized that “Good legal writing does not have to sound as [if it was] written by a lawyer.”

Niharika Bapna, who currently works as a law clerk at Tribunals Ontario, has written a research paper titled Plain Language Drafting – A Study of the Laws of India (2009-2017). She shared the paper with me some time ago. But I cannot quote from it as it’s not available in the public domain.

The Society of Indian Law Firms has reportedly been training its members in plain English. The National Judicial Academy, too, reportedly offers courses for judges on ways to make judgements easy and accessible. Reportedly, because I did not find links to any such programs by these institutions.

These are some of the developments that I have been able to find based on online searches. If there are more, please mail me [vijayalaxmiDOThegdeATgmailDOTcom] about it and I’d be happy to add them here.

Update on 27 November 2021: 

N. Watson Solomon, whose pen name is Nirmaldasan, is the creator of the Strain Index, a formula for measuring the readability of texts. He maintains a weblog Readability Monitor to keep track of plain language: . He has co-authored Plain Language In Plain English (2010).

Challenges for plain language in India

First off, the novelty of the idea. Plain language is still largely unheard of in India. Among the developments I listed above, you’ll notice that most of them have happened in the last couple of years. It could be that plain language is getting some traction, but you can’t be sure in the absence of concrete action.

However, that there is no active, overt demand for plain language doesn’t imply that people in India love gobbledygook. But the realization that plain language is actually our right is yet to catch on.

Secondly, the Victorian era legacy. English entered India in the Victorian era through the newly-established schools and colleges. It was a particularly unfortunate time for the language, with roundabout ways of talking and bloated words being in fashion then. In India, the babus and clerks also used a very servile English.

Sanyal used to say that our tendency to listen along to incomprehensible Sanskrit mantras without ever stopping to think and ask about the meaning goes well with the culture of gobbledygook.

Thirdly, entrenched lobbies. Any attempt to bring in plain language might immediately make some groups insecure. Lawyers come to mind first, but I can also see companies and bureaucrats digging their heels in.

And fourthly, no clue how to go about it. Even if someone wanted to write clearly, they wouldn’t know where to begin and whom to turn to. Of course, these are the least of our troubles, as plain language resources do exist in the public domain. It’s just that the right connections need to be made.

Way ahead?

It’s definitely uphill. But if you look at the history of the plain language movement elsewhere in the world, it was no different.

To my mind, some of the initial steps we could take to bring about plain language in India are:

Form an informal/formal advocacy group. It can be a LinkedIn group or some other online forum which we can quickly put together. We can use this space to meet regularly, float ideas, discuss challenges, and draw inspiration.

Learn from plain language movements around the world. It would particularly help if we could learn from other developing countries.

Draw inspiration from our history. The Bhakti movement that surged around the 12th century AD was a definite rejection of unintelligible gibberish associated with rituals and Sanskrit mantras and a move towards the local, plain language.

The seer-leaders of the Bhakti movement chose to speak and write songs in Kannada, Marathi, Bangla, Sindhi, and other regional languages. A close look at the Bhakti movement could be very inspiring. If we ever had a plain language movement in India, it was this.

Connect plain language to the Right to Information (RTI) Act. For, what use is information if you cannot understand it? Plain language gives teeth to RTI, because then people can take quick action based on the information they access under this Act.


I hope I’ll be able to update the Developments section of this article frequently in the days to come. And please share your thoughts on how we can further the cause of plain language in India.