Very Few Advocates Have Taken Advantage Of E-filing Facility, Registry Informs Karnataka High Court

The report was submitted following a direction by the court indicating facilities provided for e-filing of cases in the High Court as well as in the District and Trial Courts and also data of number of cases e-filed so far, while hearing a petition filed by Advocate Dilraj Rohit Sequeira.

The report also states that as on July 13, parties in person who have registered themselves as users have utilised this facility much more than the advocates. The petition was filed in the year 2019 seeking e-filing facility. During the previous hearing the court asked the petitioner's lawyer whether he had e-filed any petitions on the portal. The lawyer replied that the practice adopted was to send emails to the registry and admitted that he had not used the e-filing facility. To which the court said that the facility of sending petitions through email is only made available during the pandemic.

In an earlier order the court had noted "The process of e-filing will not be successful unless all the pending matters are scanned. The process of scanning is a tedious process as the papers in each file are required to be separated. The operation of scanning requires huge space, funds and manpower. Moreover, the servers will have to be updated. Thus, for implementing e-filing, there is a requirement of adequate space for scanning and hardware and software."

It had added "By way of example, we may state here that for Allahabad High Court, a building consisting of a basement plus two floors has been allotted by the State Government for scanning work."

The court directed the registry to forward the report to the petitioner and posted the matter for further hearing on August 13.