HC requests progress report from Maha government on publication of Ambedkar’s writings

The Bombay High Court on Wednesday requested a status report from the Maharashtra government on an ongoing project to publish the collected writings and speeches of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. A bench of judges PB Varale and AS Kilor issued an opinion to the government and asked it to file a response within three weeks.

By December 2021, HC had become aware suo motu (on its own) of newspaper reports that the project had stalled.

Calling the project “absolutely necessary and desirable”, he said the delay reflected a “sorry state of affairs” and ordered the court registry to convert the matter into a public interest litigation (PIL). On Wednesday, lawyer Swaraj Jadhav, who has been appointed to defend the PIL, said the government established the Babasaheb Ambedkar Source Documents Publication Committee in 1979 but “nothing has been done”. Ambedkar has also delivered several important speeches outside India and some of them have been published in international media, said lawyer Jadhav, adding that these speeches and reports should be included in the project.

The HC said the committee’s terms of reference would cover everything.

”When the state took the decision to publish Ambedkar’s speeches and writings, nothing prevented them from being published in the international media. There are even interviews. So the committee can review everything,’ the HC said.

”We do not believe that a specific direction is necessary to include material published in international media. We will ask the state to file an appropriate response and tell us what the status of the committee and the entire project is,” he added.

State attorney Poornima Kantharia said the government would offer a “positive response to all issues raised in the PIL.” that the government should make new appointments or reconstitute the entire panel.

According to the report published in the Marathi daily Loksatta, 33,000 copies of Ambedkar’s writings had been published under the project and only 3,675 had been made available for distribution.

(This story has not been edited by the Devdiscourse team and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)