CUTTACK: At least 100 courts in districts across the state will be made paperless in the next three months. This was announced by Chief Justice of Orissa High Court S Muralidhar during his address at the valedictory session of the two-day national conference on digitisation, paperless courts and e-initiatives on Sunday. The chief justice said a paperless regime has a positive impact on a court’s architecture.
Odisha is perhaps the first state in the country where there are paperless courts in all districts. The first paperless court in the state was inaugurated in the court of the chief justice of the high court on September 11, 2021. At present 10 benches of the high court are functioning in paperless mode. On September 17, 2022, 34 paperless courts were inaugurated in the district courts of the state.
Summing up the key takeaways of the conference, the chief justice said the judicial system needs to be more citizen-centric. Lawyers have to be brought on board to effect a complete transformation of the system and the security of data and its retrievability along with the paperless functioning of courts has to be ensured. The judiciary has to be self-reliant instead of depending on external agencies for ICT-enabled functioning and simplification of procedures, he said.
The focal point of the conference in which judges and judicial officers of all high courts participated was the implementation of the action plan of phase III of the e-courts project of the Supreme Court of India. The discussions centred around e- initiatives of high courts, the challenges faced by them and the steps taken to overcome them.
The e-committee of the Supreme Court has formulated an action plan for phase III of the e-courts project. Secretary, Department of Justice of the Central Government of India put forth the government’s budgetary plan for the phase-III of the e-courts project. There has been a budgetary outlay of Rs 7,210 crores for phase III from 2023 to 2027, a high court release stated.