CUTTACK: As many as three benches of Orissa High Court including that of the Chief Justice have gone paperless, said official sources on Saturday. This was made possible due to functioning of a state-of-the-art Record Room Digitisation Centre (RRDC) in the court.
The centre provides one-stop solution relating to storage, digitisation, preservation and retrieval of disposed of case records.
“The disposed of records are now accessible from the court room or any bench for reference over a closed and secured network on the click of the button of a mouse,” stated an official press release.
RRDC is located on the first floor of the new building of Odisha State Legal Services Authority near the Odisha Judicial Academy, around 1 km away from the High Court.
Being a Court of Records, the High Court has to ensure that its legacy records are stored and preserved securely and accessibility to such documents remain convenient and less time consuming for posterity.
While digitisation of the existing legacy records (disposed of records) was done on a massive scale, the same exercise has also been taken up for pending physical records. Besides, e-filing of cases and documents is being promoted to check inflow of paper, the press release said, adding on an average one lakh cases are filed and 85,000 disposed of every year.
Digitisation is presently underway in four districts - Balasore, Cuttack, Ganjam and Sambalpur. Digitisation of records of Cuttack district court is going on in RRDC, while in the other three districts it is going on in their respective court complexes. Gradually, these initiatives will be replicated in all the districts.
There are records which are in such fragile condition that it is impossible to scan them. Such records are permanently preserved in a separate room called fragile record room. Records more than two centuries old are preserved in the room.
There is a proposal for consulting historians and facilitating them in studying such records and research on the evolution of State judiciary, the release said.