The Supreme Court will go “paperless” within six to seven months, Chief Justice JS Khehar said. The observation on the issue of digitisation of the top court was made when senior advocate Indira Jaising, who has filed a PIL seeking uniform guidelines on designating lawyers as senior, sought expeditious disposal of her plea by a larger bench. “Within six to seven months you will not file any paper. We will electronically pick it up trial court and high court records and there will be no need of case records being filed afresh in SC,” the bench comprising the CJI and Justices DY Chandrachud and SK Kaul said.
Justice Khehar said the court will soon dispense with the need of filing voluminous documents and paperbooks as it is in the process of digitising the entire court records across the country. He said the apex court will collect all the records electronically from the lower courts and the high courts so that there is no need to file hard copies.
Earlier, in a giant leap towards digitisation, the Supreme Court has digitised a whopping one crore five lakh pages and records of civil appeals, ranging from the pre-independence era till 2002 as part of its recent reforms. The digitisation of court records has been done as part of the document management system and would make the documents accessible with just a click of the mouse, the ‘Indian Judiciary Annual Report 2015-2016’, issued by the apex court, said.
“As on date, all civil appeals pertaining to the period 1938 to 2002 have completely been scanned and are available on the Supreme Court’s D-space which may be accessed on internal network,” it said.
The report also said that as part of ongoing initiatives to streamline and improvise the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the apex court Registry, a number of software tools have been developed by computer (IT) cell during 2015-2016 and all these tools and applications were developed in-house using open source technology.
