Important To Reach Out To Citizens By Ensuring Live Streaming Of Court Proceedings; To Be Launched Across India Shortly: CJI DY Chandrachud

Chief Justice of India, Justice DY Chandrachud on Friday said that it is important to reach out to the citizens by ensuring live streaming of court proceedings. He said the same will be launched shortly across the country.

CJI Chandrachud was speaking at the virtual inauguration ceremony of two IT projects of the Delhi High Court namely “Digital Courts for Contested Traffic Challans” and “Bail Orders Sharing Module on e-Prison platform.”

He said that through live streaming, citizens can truly understand the nature of the work that judges do and the quality of input which goes into judicial proceedings.

“Live Streaming has already been adopted in several courts… in the Supreme Court, we have been ensuring live streaming in the constitution bench hearings and one thing which I've heard across the country during my travels is the uniform statement of everyone that live streaming of important hearings by the Supreme Court has truly enabled the country at large to understand the seriousness with which work is rendered by our judiciary,” CJI said.

He added: “… it is important to reach out to citizens by ensuring live streaming of our proceedings. And there is no manner of doubt that this is now a mission, which is not just confined to the personal preferences of your present Chief Justice of India, who is fond of technology, but something which we will incorporate as a permanent part of our judicial system.”

Lauding the initiatives of the Delhi High Court, CJI Chandrachud spoke about the recent initiatives taken by the Supreme Court, including the e-SCR project and introduction of neutral citations in the judgments.

“Recently, in the Supreme Court, we launched the E-SCR which was one of my dream projects. And as a result of that, almost 34,000 judgments of the Supreme Court have now been made available free of charge, together with headnotes to all citizens who wish to access our judgments. I sincerely hope that this initiative will be adopted by the high courts by putting into effect the digital versions of ILRs,” he said.

CJI Chandrachud said that the Supreme Court has put out a list of its 10,136 judgments with neutral citations so that publishers, lawyers or anyone having any objection regarding the accuracy can respond.

He said that the system of providing neutral citation will ensure that uniform citation is adopted across the country for citing judgments of the Supreme Court and High Courts.

“I do believe that the initiative which the Delhi High Court has launched today will also pave the way for the overall integration of the E-courts project with the interoperable criminal justice system. Because that truly is the need of the hour so that we as judges can have seamless connectivity with everything that comes within the criminal justice administration, commencing from lodging of FIR to the appellate stage,” CJI said.

Stressing upon the need for setting up e-sewa kendras as part of the third phase of e-courts project, CJI Chandrachud said that the idea is to reach out to the citizens and lawyers who do not have access to the internet and to bridge the “internet divide.”

“I believe that every court complex in Delhi, based on the number of footfalls must have an adequate number of e-seva Kendras where basic facilities are provided and uniformly good facilities are provided for accessing all the services which we provide, so that none of our citizens and no member of the bar is left behind in the march of technology,” CJI said.

He added: “I also feel that it will be an initiative which will be truly innovative if we can conceive of setting up e-sewa kendras within jail complexes so that those who are lodged in jails can reach out to our services and can avail of the services which we provide in terms of information, audience, case listing, and even live streaming, which we are now going to launch very shortly across India.”

Stating that the Union Government has been “extremely receptive” in providing funds for the third phase of e-courts project, CJI said that challenge now is before the High Courts to ensure that the funds are productively deployed.

“We are expecting the first tranche of nearly 2000 crores to be released in the month of June. We will have about nine months of the current financial year to expend those funds. So the ball is now in our court as courts to ensure that the funds which are released by the by the union government are effectively deployed and are utilized for the purpose for which they are being deployed,” he said.