High Court bid to go paperless, digitise data from 19th century

A source close to the registry, which has embarked on digitisation, said, “Tenders have been called for and a meeting held in this regard drew good response, with major IT players and software firms participating in it. The process would not only pave way for doing away with enormous bundles of age- old records, but would ensure easy and speedy recovery of the digitised files.” 

The process involves scanning, digitising, storing and retrieving case files and administrative files ranging from MHC’s inception in 1862. As per the current plan, at least five lakh pages need to be scanned and stored on a daily basis, within the set time frame of one year. Barring certain historical documents, which need to be protected for posterity, the remaining records would be cleared after digitisation, freeing up all the records rooms in which these age-old papers are stored. 

The process, would be open source software customisation, wherein the scanned/digitised data is stored in searchable PDF format. The digitisation plan also includes annotations and bookmarks for the relevant pages to facilitate its storage as separate attributes in the database. Indexing would also be done. 

Though the digitisation process has been welcomed, many feel that the Supreme Court’s ambitious e-courts project should be taken up with equal vigour. The project aims at digitisation of records at the lower courts and providing district judges with court docket management mechanism. This is to help redistribute work among the available judicial manpower with a district judge, and reduce pendency. However, another feature in the digitisation process is that Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul has accorded administrative sanction to accept only system generated documents for all police cases in all courts till the chargesheet stage.

As of now, the state has achieved 100 per cent computerised documents only in respect of First Information Report (FIR).But beginning next month all other police documents like inquest, arrest card, seizure mahazar and chargesheet submitted to courts ought to be digitised adding up to the vision of a paper-free Madras High Court.