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The Delhi High Court has recently directed the Delhi Govt & Administrative Wing of the Delhi High Court to examine the Standard Operating Procedure (“SOP”) provided by Advocate Ankur Mahindro & to take decisions concerning simultaneous filing of digital pleadings/records, and digitization of pending cases. 

“During the Pandemic, the State also provided substantial infrastructure to enable the Courts to function through online mode. The lawyering community has also got reasonably adept at filing cases during this period through the online/ electronic mode, and the Courts have also been proficiently taking up cases through online mode. The learning and experience derived during this period, in our view, should be capitalised upon, and apart from filing in the physical mode, the filing of digital pleadings and documents should also be encouraged. The same would save the resources, which the Court would have to otherwise deploy in digitizing the pleadings, documents, and records.”, Division Bench of Justice Vipin Sanghi & Justice Rekha Palli noted. 

In the present matter, the petitioner filed a petition during the peak of CoVID-19 Pandemic when the functioning of the Courts including the Family Court was impacted severely. The petition was filed to seek directions for taking up matters virtually, including recording of evidence through online mode.

The Counsel for the petitioner also proposed an SOP Qua Digitization Of Records as per which the following suggestions were made: 

1. Adhering to strict timelines for increasing bandwidth within a period of 2-3 weeks 
2. The Court should invite tenders within two weeks time for inviting bids for digitization of judicial records. The tender should include the following:
   • Scanning and digitization of case files (current and decided) as also scanning/digitization of fresh cases filed on the same day.
   • Digitization shall include inter alia scanning, indexing, storing, archiving and retrieval of court records in digital form in a secure manner.
   • Application software and methodology to be adopted for seamless integration with existing DMS Software or any other workflow system that may be used by the Courts.
   • Imparting of training to Court staff on scanning, indexing, storing, archiving, retrieval and printing process.
   • Hardware, System Software and other ICT infrastructure required for implementation of this project in a secure manner.
   • Setup counters at the filing counter(s) for the receiving of scanning charges (fixed by the Delhi High Court) and do bookmarking of the cases filed at the counter(s) as per current practice within rates proposed by the vendor.
   • The vendor must have adequate experience of having scanned, digitizing, indexing, archiving and retrieval of documents and must provide minimum commitment of pages each day as may be decided by the District Courts Committee. 
3. Directing the service provider to complete the digitization and scanning work as per strict daily targets/timelines to ensure that the digitization/scanning work is completed in a time bound manner. For instance, if a daily target of 1 lakh pages is set and achieved, the scanning/digitization work of 3 crore pages (as per the Affidavit) will take at least 300 days to get completed. In the prevailing circumstances, the whole purpose of digitization shall be rendered infructuous if the whole process takes almost a year to complete.
4. Endeavors should be made to ensure that at least 6 lakh pages per day, if not more, are being scanned/digitized by the service provider and direct the service provider to set up multiple workstations at various District Court(s) to complete the work expeditiously and in a time bound manner.
5. To prioritise digitization of important judicial records with respect to the matters coming up in the next two months 
6. Scanned/digitized copies of the judicial record are bookmarked and made readable (OCR- Optical Character Recognition) for the convenience of the Hon’ble Court(s).
7. District Court Committee should take the following steps for smooth functioning of digitization:
   • An adequate space for setting up scanning services shall be provided by the Courts in each court complex to the service provider for carrying on such digitization activities.
   • Multiple spaces may be set up, dividing files on the basis of either districts falling under each court complex, or as civil, criminal and family courts.
   • Adequate space in an easily accessible area inside the court complex for opening a filing desk where a lawyer/litigant will have the choice of filing any plaint/petition/application either in a pen drive or in paper.

Thus while disposing off the petition, the Bench observed that, “From time to time, this Court has passed several orders in the present petition to deal with the issues raised by the petitioner including directions passed on the administrative side for filing of cases through online mode as well. With the passage of time, the situation improved, resulting in resumption of physical filing of documents and pleadings."

Case Title: Anand Vaid v. Preeti Vaid