Supreme Court to adopt paperless e-filing in less than seven months: CJI Khehar

In a move to cut down the cost on paper waste, J.S. Khehar, the Chief Justice of India has announced that the Supreme Court will go paperless in the coming six to seven months. The various different types of levels in the Indian Judiciary system calls for filing of bulky appeals, petitions and other hefty documents. Not only does it become a tedious task to sift through these decades old voluminous court records but it also clogs the court record rooms.

CJI says that after these few months of preparation for digitizing Supreme Court's filing system, it will electronically collect trial court and High Court records. This decision comes in the wake of removing the underlying cost, terminating wastage of paper and freeing storage space. According to The Times of India, CJI J.S. Khehar said, "We will electronically pick up records from trial courts and high courts. There will be no need for appellants to file those records. The appeal just has to state the grounds on which the petitioner is challenging a judgment in the Supreme Court".

This development represents the first step towards creating an electronic court system for e-filing and a move that will ultimately incorporate IT and technology in the court of law. The decision to digitize Supreme Court by converting all the paper work into records retrieved by adopting electronic method will undoubtedly ease many processes:

• This would prevent an immense amount of paper wastage.
• The new automatic and electronic transmission and storage of legal records or documents will strongly encourage usage of e-filing method.
• It will eliminate the risk of misplacing important documents and searching specific record would become uncomplicated.
• Sending and receiving legal documents will be accomplished in a matter of seconds.
• e-filing will help to margin costs for printing, copying or preparing documents for filing.