CJI DY Chandrachud urges High Courts to continue with virtual hearing; says litigants can't be burdened because judges are not tech-savvy

Judiciary and judges have to embrace technology for the benefit of litigants and litigants cannot be burdened because judges are uneasy with technology, Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud said on Saturday..The CJI implored High Courts to continue using technology enabling hybrid hearings, pointing out that such facilities are not meant for use only during COVID-19 pandemic."In one of my judgments which I was editing last night, I have said we cannot burden our lawyers due to our uneasiness with technology. The answer is simple: retrain ourselves," CJI Chandrachud said. He touched upon his recent correspondence with Chief Justices to allow lawyers to appear virtually."Some High Courts have disbanded video conference system but the infrastructure is in place. The question is not about the infrastructure but are we using it? I get a lot of PILs from lawyers across India that hybrid hearings have been stopped. I would appeal to the Chief Justices that please do not disband that infrastructure and technology was not confined to the COVID19 pandemic and it was for COVID and beyond," he underscored. The CJI was speaking at the National Conference on Digitisation being held in Odisha, where he inaugurated a neutral citation system as well.In the context of the the top court recently launching a new version of its e-filing portal for crowd testing, the CJI said,"We have engaged with lawyers and clerks of lawyers and we are in final stage and it is called awareness. We have aksed AoRs etc to come in groups who would be made aware of e-filing. The munshi and clerks are being trained and they cannot be left behind in the march of technology. The idea is to have mascots (representative members of the bar) who will do all e-filings, before we make it mandatory for all. Once e filing is there, there should ne no physical filing.".He reiterated that the top court is not meant for just Delhi but exists for the entire country. .The CJI also spoke about his vision to create paperless and virtual courts over the cloud.However, he also flagged some recent incidents resulting from live-streaming of proceedings in the process. "There are clips of a how a Patna High Court judge asking a IAS officer as to how he was not properly dressed. These are funny clips, which should be controlled since there are serious stuff, which happens in the courtroom... So interface of live streaming with social media is posing a new challenge for us and we need a centralised cloud infrastructure for the live streaming. We need new hardware for courts."He emphasised that Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools would be handy even as judges' discretion would be necessary for aspects like sentencing. "We do not think we want to cede our discretion, which we exercise on sound judicial lines in terms of sentencing policy. At the same time, AI is replete with possibilities and it is possible for the Supreme Court to have record of 10,000 or 15,000 pages? How do you expect a judge to digest documents of 15,000 pages, which comes with a statutory appeal?".[Follow our live-coverage of the event]