I wrote about the status of plain language in India some time ago. This is an update to that post.
>> In March this year, the then Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud asked judges to write judgments “in a language comprehensible to the common people”. I wish I had a link available to the full text of his speech, but I don’t. This is perhaps the most important call for plain language till date in India.
>> Vidhi updated its manual for legal drafting and renamed it SARAL. “The SARAL Manual builds on the work of the 2017 manual and intends to compile learnings from the past five years to develop a more comprehensive, holistic approach toward legal drafting,” it says. SARAL is open to public feedback. I have given them mine. You can give yours too.
>> Earlier this year, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) issued guidelines for the draft offer document to be in clear language. The draft offer document is submitted by a company to SEBI before an initial public offering (IPO).
If the guidelines are not followed, SEBI says, it may return the document to the company.
>> In "Gauging Linguistic Complexity of Regulatory Communication: A Case Study for India" published in its April bulletin, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) used readability indicators to look at the language of banking regulations. It concluded that "most circulars require at least graduate level education, which is generally the education level of commercial bank employees."
While this step from the RBI is welcome, the case study stops at assessing internal banking content. The next move has to be to look at the complexity of the language of the forms, contracts, agreements and other documents that banks present to their customers.
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Louder and clearer, please?
There has been a flurry of articles on plain language, mostly focused on its use in law. I came upon appeals for a plain language act by law students here and here. The term plain language is now heard more often in India than ever before. Jobs too are opening up in plain language, though mostly for plain-language summary writers.
While these are good developments in themselves, we now have to step it up and make sure that it is not mere noise. We need to take substantial steps towards actually adopting plain language.
I say this because some of the appeals, articles, or guidelines for plain language that I have mentioned here are themselves not plain. So it leaves me in doubt if the authors understand what it is to speak clearly. However, I will park these misgivings of mine for now and hope that we can keep working towards more clarity.
