Delivering a judgment recently on a Public Interest Litigation (PIL), the Gujarat High Court dismissed the claim by the petitioner that Hindi is the National Language of India. The High Court Bench which included Chief Justice S.J.Mukherjee said that Hindi can be termed as an official language of India which is used widely in official work, but there is no notification issued (by the central government) conferring any national language status to Hindi.
Elaborating further, the court said that there is no denial that Hindi has been accepted as a national language by large section of people in India and that Hindi is spoken and written in Devnagari script (the ancient and vedic era language Sanskrit is written in Devnagri script) by large number of peoples in India. But it is also a fact that Hindi is not the National Language of India.
The judgment was delivered in connection with a PIL filed by one Suresh Kacharia, asking the court to make it mandatory and direct the manufacturers of packaged items to print all manufacturing details including the price on the packet in Hindi Language. The bench delivered the aforesaid judgment while dismissing the PIL and stated that in view of the above facts the court was unable to give any directions to the central or state governments as well as packaged item manufacturers for printing packaging details in Hindi.
Here it will be of interest to know that as per 2001 census of India, out of the total national population of 1027 millions, Hindi is the mother tongue of 366 millions mostly concentrated in the northern and central states of India.
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