Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud on Saturday said that litigants cannot be burdened because judges are uneasy with technology.
Speaking at the National Conference on Digitisation being held in Odisha, where he inaugurated a neutral citation system as well, the CJI said that the judiciary and the judges have to embrace technology for the benefit of litigants.
CJI Chandrachud exhorted the High Courts across the country to continue using technology enabling hybrid hearings, pointing out that such facilities were not meant for use only during the Covid-19 pandemic.
He said In one of his verdicts which he was editing last night, the CJI said that some High Courts have disbanded video conference system, but the infrastructure was in place.
Talking about his recent correspondence with Chief Justices to allow lawyers to appear virtually, he said the question was not about the infrastructure, but whether the judiciary was using it?
He said he was receiving a lot of PILs from lawyers across India that hybrid hearings have been stopped.
He appealed to the Chief Justices not to disband the infrastructure and that technology was not confined to the Covid-19 pandemic, but it was for Covid and beyond.
He said the top court of the country recently launched a new version of its e-filing portal for crowd testing.
As per the CJI, they have engaged with lawyers and clerks of lawyers and were in final stage and that it was called awareness.
The CJI said the AoRs have been asked to come in groups, so that they can be made aware of e-filing.
Stating that the munshi and clerks could not be left behind in the march of technology, the CJI said they were also being trained to use the portal. He revealed that the idea was to have mascots (representative members of the bar), who will do all e-filings, before the process is made mandatory for all. Once e-filing became a part of the judicial process, there would not be any need of physical filing, he added.
Reiterating that the top court was not meant only for Delhi but existed for the entire country, the CJI revealed his plans to create paperless and virtual courts over the cloud.
However, he listed some recent incidents resulting from live-streaming of proceedings, which, as per the CJI, should have been avoided.
He mentioned the incident of a Patna High Court judge asking an IAS officer as to how he was not properly dressed. The CJI said these were funny clips, which should be controlled since there was serious stuff happening in the courtroom.
Stating that the interface of live streaming with social media was posing a new challenge for the judiciary, CJI Chandrachud stressed on the importance of having a centralised cloud infrastructure for live streaming. He also mentioned the need to have new hardware for courts.
He emphasised that Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools would be handy even as the judges’ discretion would be necessary for aspects like sentencing.