Though E-Filing Portal Is Available, Very Few Lawyers Doing E-Filing : Karnataka High Court

A division bench of Chief Justice Abhay Oka and Justice Suraj Govindaraj said "Regular portal for e-filing is available for more than 1 year".

The bench directed the Registrar (Computer) to file a report before the court on facilities provided for e-filing of cases in High court as well as District and trial courts. The report will also have to give data of the number of cases e-filed so far.

During the hearing of a petition filed by one Dilraj Rohit Sequeira in 2019 seeking e-filing facility, 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.

It remarked "You file a petition seeking e-filing facility and you don't know that there is an e-filing portal made available."

(E-filing can be done on the following portal https://efiling.ecourts.gov.in/kar/)

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 has now posted the matter for further hearing on July 14 and directed the registry to file the report in a sealed envelope on that day.