Bhubaneswar: District Court Digitisation Hubs (DCDH) were inaugurated in Odisha by Chief Justice of India, Dr Justice D Y Chandrachud on virtual mode as part of efforts to reduce paper works.
The CJI inaugurated the DCDH in 10 districts in presence of Chief Justice Dr S Muralidhar and the Judges of High Court of Orissa. Justice D Dash, Chairman and the members of the RRDC Committee of the High Court were present on the occasion.
DCDHs were in Angul, Bhadrak, Jharsuguda, Kalahandi, Keonjhar, Koraput, Malkangiri, Mayurbhanj, Nayagarh and Sonepur.
Hailing the initiatives of the High Court of Orissa, Dr Chandrachud said very soon the High Court would be mentoring the entire judiciary of the nation in the field of digitisation.
The District Judges, Judicial Officers, Office Bearers of the Bar Associations and the officials of the district administration attended the event through virtual mode.
Space management is one of the major challenges for the courts. Constant inflow of papers into the courts creates huge problem in storage and much of the manpower, office hours and office space is consumed for storage of the case records.
Procuring physical records for grant of certified copies, prevention of damage to the records, safe-keeping of records of lower courts, reconstruction of damaged records are challenging tasks in physical storage of records.
To overcome these problems the concept of digitisation was introduced by the e-committee, Supreme Court. By the process of digitisation the risks of damage and misplacement of documents from the physical case records can be avoided and softcopies of the records can be safely stored for easy access for various purposes such as hearing in paperless courts, grant of certified copies etc.
Besides, digitisation is the only solution to the humongous problem of space crunch. Digitisation of records has been taken up by the High Court of Orissa, both in the High Court and the District Courts.
Initially, 4 District Court Digitisation Centres (DCDC) were set up on a pilot basis in Cuttack, Ganjam, Sambalpur and Balasore on April 30, 2021.
As on November 30, 2022, a total of 5,94,237 records of district courts containing 5,58,13,771 pages have been scanned in the 4 DCDCs. Out of them 4,62,618 records containing 3,37,87,583 pages have been uploaded on the server.
Due to encouraging results from the 4 DCDCs the High Court of Orissa decided to upgrade these Centres into District Court Digitization Hubs (DCDH). Further, DCDHs were now inaugurated in 10 more districts.
These hubs will cover digitisation works of all the 30 districts of the state. Each DCDH would be assigned with the digitisation work of the nearby districts. The objective of the DCDH would be to digitise the disposed of case records of the parent districts as well as that of the nearby assigned Districts.
Chief Justice, Dr S Muralidhar stressed the need of harnessing technology as an effective tool for imparting quality justice. He said establishment of e-facilitation centres in all the districts and regular training of all the stake holders has helped a lot in reaping the benefits of the ICT initiatives like e-filing, e-payment of Court Fes, Virtual Hearing etc. The Chief Justice informed about the High Court’s decision to provide touch screen laptops to every judicial officer of the State with a view to facilitating the officers to work paperless.
In the inaugural address, Dr Justice Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud applauded the ICT measures of the High Court of Orissa and said the digitisation work undertaken by the High Court under the leadership of Dr. S. Muralidhar is now a role model for all the High Courts of the country.
The CJI emphasised on digitisation as the most important step towards modernisation of judiciary, especially the trial courts which are the backbone. He highlighted the benefits of digitisation, such as easier access to records by authorised persons, organised information keeping, reduction of time to search documents, security of the documents and records etc.
The CJI also stressed that digitization must be accompanied with pushing e-filing otherwise it would be difficult to go on digitizing everything which is filed in physical form in long run.
