In December, a small section of Delhi High Court became India’s first “e-court”, embracing technology through a pilot project. According to Kruttika Vijay and Prashant Reddy of leading intellectual property blog SpicyIP, “the key feature of the e-court is the ability of lawyers to make paperless digitized submissions, including submissions where references can be hyperlinked to help the judge instantly access further information on a given matter.” In other words, a complex or technical matter could be quickly understood during a hearing through access to the internet.
“The courtroom now sports a screen, which as yet only passively displays the cause list,” write Vijay and Reddy on their blog, “but perhaps as time goes by, one may be able to see what exactly the judge can see as well, in order to have the lawyers and the judge – literally – on the same page.”
The SpicyIP team also notes that the high court’s computer committee, headed by justice BD Ahmed, has already digitized around 55 million papers relating to cases that took place before 2007. The process has involved scanning documents and storing them on a central server so that the documents can be accessed by all computers in the court’s intranet. This is not the first time the Indian judiciary has gone hi-tech. In April, Bombay High Court took a technological leap when for the first time it delivered a judgment via video conferencing.
