The Hindu : Courts in metros to be networked

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jun 02, 2002

National

National

Courts in metros to be networked

By J. Venkatesan

NEW DELHI JUNE 1. The Centre has embarked on computerisation and networking of courts in the four metropolitan cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai and also plans to set up an e-court Bench in the Supreme Court on the pattern of Singapore.

According to highly-placed Law Ministry sources, filing of cases, issue of notices and allocation of cases are being done with the help of the computer and day-to-day orders and judgments are available on the internet. The administration of court has also been computerised.

In view of this, it is planned to set up one e-court Bench in the Supreme Court in which all proceedings will be conducted using floppies and computers. Depending on its success, it will be gradually extended to other courts.

As an experiment, similar e-courts will be established in High Courts also.

Courts in the four metropolitan cities will be computerised and networked at an estimated cost of Rs. 14.91 crores and 8.53 crores had already been allotted during 2001-2002 — Delhi Rs. 4.98 crores; Mumbai, 1.56 crores; Kolkata, Rs. 1.17 crores and Chennai, 0.82 crore.

According to sources, Rs. 6.40 crores will be released to Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai during 2002-2003 after reviewing the progress by the Project Steering Committee and on receipt of due utilisation certificate.

Once the networking is completed, a central enquiry and facilitation centre connected to this network will be set up in each court complex. Complaints and petitions can be filed and enquiries about pending cases made at these centres.

The litigants will be informed of the defects in their petitions, if any, without the need to access individual courts, and asked to rectify them within two weeks.

Thereafter, cases will be registered and allocated to judges/magistrates according to the work distribution schedule already fed into the computer and dates for appearance of the parties will be set.

A chronological record of the trial of each case will be maintained on the network and the final order made available on the network. Copies of the orders can be obtained on payment from the facilitation counters.

Computerisation and networking of courts in the four cities is expected to substantially expand the capacities of courts and speed up justice-delivery system.

During the conference of State Law and Home Secretaries and Registrars-General of High Courts held here on Friday, a review of the progress of the networking was made and the four States were asked to expedite networking.

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