Chief Justice Vikram Nath Paid An Impromptu Visit To The Central Filing Centre (CFC) Of Gujarat HC [Read Report]

The main purpose of this surprise visit was to have a first-hand understanding of the processes followed in the Central Filing Centre, more particularly on the matters filed through recently started e-Filing portal.

Also, for being concerned with litigants and lawyers to ensure smooth and seamless processes in newly introduced citizen-oriented service of e-Filing, unscheduled visit of the Chief Justice was made.

To see the process of raising objections by the concerned Officials of the Central Filing Centre, in the regular as well as e-Filed matters, a couple of matters were processed in presence of the Chief Justice while also explaining to him as to why and how a particular objection was being raised in the matter.

The timeline of stages of receipt, filing, scrutiny, registration and thereafter circulation, objections arose (if any), are cleared; was understood in detail by His Lordship.

Before leaving the premises, the Chief Justice made it a point to also visit the room from where the Helpline calls are being attended to.

During the visit to the place, the Chief Justice, himself attended a telephone call from an Advocate about his sent document still not having been taken up for clearing the objection in his filed matter.

The Chief Justice also ascertained from the Advocate as to when the objection was raised and how and when the document was sent to the Registry and the said details were noted for attending to the grievance.

It was instructed to the concerned personnel to ensure that maximum calls are attended to and issues reported are resolved as expeditiously as possible.

During his surprise visit, the Chief Justice observed that in order to obviate the unavoidable precautionary time-gap of processing the hard copies received at the physical counter in view of the present pandemic; and for expeditious filing, scrutiny, registration and circulation of matters, the only panacea is that, the maximum number of matters should be encouraged to be filed through the e-Filing portal.

He also remarked that the main benefit of the e-Filing, amongst many other benefits, is that the status of the filed matter starts reflecting immediately to the concerned Advocate of the filing party, in addition to the SMS and Email update sent by the e-Filing portal.

The report of Chief Justice's surprise visit also states that as desired by the Chief Justice and also the Honourable Judges of the Committee examining the concerns raised by the Bar Association with regard to the expressed delays in the circulation of matters, an online training cum awareness program for select Advocates of the Bar has been arranged.