BANGALORE: Even as the Karnataka Government is going ahead with an ambitious project to connect Bangalore and its surroundings through wireless LAN (Wi-Fi where cables would not be required to access the Internet), the judiciary in the State is quietly working on a project to electronically transmit first information reports (FIR) from the police stations to courts.

The State Government has set up a committee to ensure that Bangalore, popularly labelled as the Silicon Valley of India, would be connected through wireless and that the Internet could be accessed at the click of a mouse and without the aid of cables.

If the Government feels that the Wi-Fi project would give a fillip to the software industry, the Karnataka High Court feels that its project to digitally transmit FIRs would expedite the course of justice and drastically cut down on delay.

S.R. Bannurmath, senior judge of the Karnataka High Court and in-charge of the computerisation of the judiciary in the State, told The Hindu that the electronic project had been thought about as an effective and expeditious tool to ensure that delays in placing the records before the courts were minimised. He said that almost all the police stations in the State had been computerised and several records were already being fed into the police computer network.

He said once the FIRs were registered and fed into the computer, they could be transmitted almost immediately to the courts. While the police stations could continue having the original FIRs, the electronic FIRs could come in handy for the courts to pass orders.

He said once the electronic project was introduced, any person could lodge an FIR in any police station and it could be transmitted to either the jurisdictional police station or the jurisdictional court.

Mr. Bannurmath said the project could help both the police and the judiciary in several ways. While it could aid the judiciary in hearing and disposing of habeas corpus petitions, it could help the police in expeditiously transmitting data, avoid delays and also help them in becoming more transparent in their duties. The filing of the FIRs would become more professional once the police come to know that it would be scrutinised by the judiciary.

A majority of the complaints against the police was that they had detained persons without showing any arrest or that no FIRs had been filed. There were also complaints that the FIRs had either been "rewritten" or "reworded". Most of these complaints would cease once electronic transfer of FIRs was introduced.

Another benefit was that it would save wastage of manpower by ensuring that policemen were not exclusively deputed to hand over the FIRs to court. The original FIRs, Mr. Bannurmath pointed out, could be produced when the hearing of a case commenced.

He said the project was still at the conceptual stage and spadework needed to be done to put the project in place. Karnataka would perhaps be the first State in the country to take up such a project.

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