Why stop at Hindi?

The Budget should be translated into every Indian language

When Finance Minister Arun Jaitley presented the Union Budget to Parliament on Thursday, one aspect of his speech stood out: the fact that large sections of it were in Hindi. It was the first bilingual Budget presentation in recent times. Mr Jaitley’s predecessor, P Chidambaram, had been fond of ending his speeches with a quote from the Tamil language’s classical poet, Thiruvalluvar, but Mr Jaitley actually delivered substantive sections of the Budget in Hindi. Like many who speak Hindi with ease and idiomatically, Mr Jaitley stumbled over some sections of the Sanskritised Hindi of Indian official documents, but nevertheless, the