Lawyers, Litigants And Subordinate Judiciary Are Being Inconvenienced Due To Delay Caused In Digitisation Of District Courts: Delhi HC Seeks Response [Read Order]

The Division Bench of Justice Hima Kohli and Justice Subramonium Prasad has further directed that any correspondence exchanged between the District Judge (Headquarters) and the Delhi Government shall preferably be conducted electronically to save precious time and to ensure expeditious disposal of pending issues.

The order has come in a writ petition seeking a direction to be issued to the District Courts to record evidence in pending matters through virtual hearings.

Today, Mr Anupam Srivastava, who appeared for the Delhi Government, submitted that the two urgent proposals forwarded by the District Court to the Delhi Government relating to procurement of manual attached storage and routers, both essential for conducting Virtual Courts, have not been cleared as the financial implications of the said proposals is above ₹1 crore.

The court was further informed by Mr Srivastava that the said matter has to be placed before the Council of Ministers for giving appropriate sanction.

In addition to this, Senior Advocate Mohit Mathur, who's the President of the Delhi High Court Bar Association, informed the court that the legal community and the litigants are facing great difficulty in participating in virtually matters listed before the Judges of the District Courts.

DHCBA submitted that in the absence of adequate bandwidth, the judges are having to resort to using the software of CISCO Webex, which is a free app that provides a slot of 40 minutes at one time and halfway through the arguments, counsels get automatically delinked.

'Delhi Government be called upon to take expeditious steps to clear the pending proposals referred to hereinabove, to provide seamless hearing in virtual courts', Mr Mathur contended.

In light of these submissions, the court highlighted:

'We may note that all the pending proposals in question relating to the District Courts have been pending at the end of the Delhi Government since the year 2018. It is a different matter that due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation that occurred in March, 2020, courts have had to resort to virtual hearings. The need of the hour is to provide adequate bandwidth, Network attached storage and Routers, etc., to facilitate conducting virtual courts.'

The court further directed for this order to be placed before the Law Minister, Delhi Government, who is in the process of preparing a note on the pending proposal for being placed before the Council of Ministers.

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