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, founder of one the top legal firms in India and Clarity member, 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 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 authored a chapter in 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.

Corona communication: What can India do better?

How is India communicating to its citizens about the Corona pandemic? In this post, I talk mainly about how the government, a chief player in crisis communication, can improve its messaging. I have only briefly touched upon how the media is faring, as that merits a separate conversation altogether.

Leaders must not preface. Get to the point quickly. This is the first rule of plain language. In general, governments find it hard to comply with plain language, but if there was ever a time to start doing so, it's now. In prime minister Narendra Modi's first speech on corona, he took a full minute to even mention the name of the virus. Contrast that with German chanceller Angela Merkel's speech where she begins right away with Corona. Her speech is also less than half the length of Modi's – keep it short, stupid?

What is plain language? To put it briefly, speaking in plain language means the target audience of the message should be able to understand the message at the first attempt. Using familiar words words, avoiding jargon are important principles of plain language. If you must use a new term or jargon, explain it. Crises are not a time when anyone would want to or can look up the meaning of rarely-used words and phrases.

Responding to Corona has resulted in a barrage of new words and phrases being coined. Some cultures may find it particularly hard to understand concepts such as "social distancing". In India, where a typical queue more often looks like what you see below, clear, detailed instructions are necessary on how one goes about distancing oneself in various public situations. "Physical distancing" may have made it clearer.

"Physical distancing" and not "social distancing" may
have been a clearer term to use in India.
Image source: Medium 

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee provided a demo on buying vegetables while maintaining distance between each other.

Provide speedy, easy access to information. In times of crisis, people are hungry for information on how to take care of themselves and their families, where and how to get food and medicine, and so on. The health and family welfare ministry's website has been turned into a Corona portal. Yet, it still does not serve as the repository of all Corona-related information in India. For instance, how and where one can one find essential goods and services during a lockdown? Remember, this is an unprecedented event. There's no such thing as too much information in such times. The government must also consider setting up a disaster/crisis communications center, perhaps as part of the National Disaster Management Authority which can evolve standards and best practices for government agencies, healthcare personnel, media, etc. to use.

State governments should provide more granular information, such as district-wise data on where to get food, medicines, local numbers to contact the police, the district health authorities, and any other state-specific information.

Translate and localize. The central government's Corona portal or app as well as the helpline should be available in all the 22 official languages of India. So should the NDMA's. There can't be any excuses for not communicating in any major language of India at such a time. It's not hard to put together this multilingual information: the states will anyway be producing content in their own languages. The centre just has to collate this.

Another critical takeaway for the government from Corona: recognise the linguistic rights of Indian citizens and invest in translation. India has a thriving ecosystem of language service providers (LSPs) who provide a range of language services. Rope them in to create a nation-wide panel of translators and interpreters which any government agency can hire at a moment's notice. Other multilingual societies such as the European Union have done so and even gone on to prepare themselves for crisis translation. Learn from them.

It's not enough to merely translate. One of the government's frequently broadcast messages on the do's and don'ts to prevent the spread of the disease has the actor Amitabh Bachchan talking about using tissues when one sneezes or coughs. Apparently, this has been adapted from international advisories. But how many people in India use a tissue or have access to it? The video skips mentioning the alternative to tissues, which is sneezing into your elbow. This advice needed to be localized to India's reality where most people use a cloth napkin or handkerchief when they have a cold or a cough. Of course, it would have to be followed up with advice on carefully handling and washing the used napkin. Let's also remember that our waste management workers often work with no protective gear. So, if the urban masses used and disposed tissues by the kilograms, think about the potential risks to these workers and the probability of mass infections.

Also, provide information in different formats to cater to people of varying literacy levels as well as people with no or little internet access. Use simple infographics to explain how the disease spreads and what one can do to stay safe.

Fight misinformation. While accurate information may be hard to come by, there is no dearth of fake news, ranging from propagating superstitions, to scaremongering, to furthering political agendas. When Modi asked people to show appreciation to essential services providers by clapping at 5 pm on janata curfew day, WhatsApp forwards went crazy claiming the government would spray some medicine to kill the virus and that's why people were being asked to stay home. The message also said that once the medicine was sprayed, life would return to normal the next day. It can't get more dangerous than this. Social network and chat app providers should work extra hard to quickly catch and filter out fake news forwards and regularly alert people on how they can recognise fake news. Of course, the prime minister could himself have merely thanked the essential services providers and not asked for that specific step. Stick to relevant stuff – another mantra for disaster messaging.

Media, please rein in yourself. On the eve of India's lockdown, I watched in silent horror as the editor of a top Kannada news channel encouraged police personnel to do whatever it takes, even beat up people, to make sure they didn't venture out. We've seen where that has led us. So, please do not play the vigilante. If possible, please work to remind the state that it's still a democracy.

And, enough with the horror-movie style background music and intimidating styles of delivering the news: there's enough horror unfolding as it is, spare us the add-ons.

Ultimately, communication in times of Corona or any other disaster is as much a governance issue as it is a health one. Not being able to communicate clearly and effectively simply means that the government has failed. Let's communicate in plain language and in all the languages of India to win against Corona. It can provide critical lessons in upholding democracy. After all, information is our right.