NEW DELHI: For every day that the Supreme Court works, some 20 trees are felled to provide paper for documenting its proceedings, including petitions, case histories, orders and annexures carrying related information. Thankfully, this will not be the case six months from now, when the apex court is expected to go completely paperless.
Last month, Chief Justice of India J S Khehar during a hearing assured the counsels that the Supreme Court will go paperless in next six months and according to sources, the work of completely digitising the apex court is going on in full swing and after that bulky paper books will be a thing of the past. This will help save over 4,500 trees per year from being axed.
Work on digitising court records is already progressing in the lower courts, which means that thousands of trees are being saved from going down at another level as well. Though e-filing system was introduced in the Supreme Court in 2006, it failed to take off as only a negligible number of litigants and lawyers opted to use electronic filing.
On an average, nearly 500 petitions or annexures are filed in the apex court and each petition is over 400 pages as different copies need to be taken for the benefit of all parties. Or if it’s an old case, the main petition alone, annexed with all previous orders, would run into
400 pages.
A tree produces 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets of A4 size but in the judiciary the size of the paper used is A3, which is a little longer and one ream is 500 pages.
The Supreme Court thus consumes 19 trees a day to have 1,61,000 pages as petitions filed, which works out to 114 trees per week. If the court opens for four weeks, then it comes to 456 trees per month. So, in a span of 10 months, excluding the two-month recess, the court will have used 4,560 trees approximately.
Once the digitisation work is complete, the apex court would electronically collect the records of trial courts and high courts and there would be no need for case records to be filed afresh.
Those wanting to move the top court would only have to briefly put in writing the grounds on which they challenge an order.
By adopting e-filing, every case will be scrutinised to identify the filing defects, if any, and will be immediately communicated by a registry to Advocate-on-Record, or the litigant by an e-mail, secured with the required security features. All counter affidavits and additional documents too can be filed in in the same manner in due course.