We know what Parliament meetings look like, and how Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha runs with the presence of our very own elected ministers. All we could acknowledge is the utter noise in both the upper house and lower houses respectively. At some or other moment we might have got a doubt regarding the presence of headphones on our ministers’ ears. Yes! we often acknowledge this, but ignore the reason just for some reason. So, here we did some research for you and came up with the valid reason behind that.

And the answer lies in our constitution itself. Under article 120, the business of both the Houses of Parliament is transacted in Hindi or English. In order to enable the Members to communicate directly across the language barrier, a two-channel system of simultaneous interpretation from Hindi to English and vice-versa was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 7 September 1964.

Subsequently, to facilitate Members who could not express themselves adequately in Hindi or English, it was decided to extend the facility of simultaneous interpretation in some of the languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution.

Again during November 1969, this facility was extended to some more languages of the Eighth Schedule. At present, the facility of simultaneous interpretation is available in the following languages namely: Assamese, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Manipuri, Maithili, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.

So, Attendees (i.e Members of resp House) can then listen to the interpretations on Headphone. The time taken by the translator makes the member wait for a while to respond to the context. Isn’t this quite amazing?

Well, just like the story behind the briefcase carried by our finance ministers, this is the story behind the headphones and it looks quite apt.

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