RS members can speak in mother tongue in House

Rajya Sabha members can now speak in their mother tongue while participating in the discussions in the House from the upcoming Monsoon Session.

At the initiative of Rajya Sabha chairman M Venkaiah Naidu, the Upper House now has interpreters for all the 22 Indian languages listed in the 8th Schedule of the Constitution, for simultaneous interpretation of House proceedings.

Naidu on Tuesday formally inducted interpreters for five languages — Dogri, Kashmiri, Konkani, Santhali and Sindhi.

Speaking in mother tongue enables better expression of thoughts, Naidu said addressing a function here.

Of the 22 scheduled languages, the Rajya Sabha had earlier established simultaneous interpretation service for 12 languages — Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

For five languages — Bodo, Maithili, Manipuri, Marathi and Nepali, interpreters of the Lok Sabha were being deployed.

"I have always felt that mother tongue is the natural medium to convey our feelings and thoughts without any retention. In a multilingual setting such as Parliament, members must not feel handicapped or inferior to others due to language constraints," Naidu said here.

The Rajya Sabha Secretariat reached out to language departments of universities, missions of respective states in Delhi and various welfare associations to identify persons well conversant in these languages, a Rajya Sabha Secretariat official said.