Indian judiciary fortunate to have certain judges who drove computerisation forward: Justice S Muralidhar

The Indian judiciary was fortunate to have certain judges like Justices Madan Lokur and BD Ahmed, who were keen to drive computerisation progress forward, former Orissa High Court Chief Justice S Muralidhar on Sunday.."Because of such tech savvy judges, Justice Ravindra Bhat’s court in Delhi High Court became the first paperless court in the country in 2010. My court (Orissa High Court) was the second," he added.Justice Muralidhar was speaking on the topic 'Appearing in virtual mode - Technology and Indian Courts in 21st Century' at the 12th Annual Daksh Constitution Day lecture organised in Bengaluru on November 26 .In his speech, the former judge highlighted that all technological changes in the judiciary have been judge driven."While today judges have got on to paperless courts, many lawyers have not. Neither judiciary nor government are in total control of constantly changing technology. The very first instance where computer was deployed for caveat matching was in Supreme Court in 1989," he remarked..The initial push towards digitisation of courts involved computerization, cause list management and case categorization. This phase persisted until 2015, Justice Muralidhar underscored."In the first phase, the control was with National Informatics Centre. In second phase, control was left to High Courts and e-committee of Supreme Court provided direction and planning. The second phase helped with a lot of data analytics with the development of National Judicial Data Grid," he said..One of the milestones of second phase of digitisation was National Service and Tracking of Electronic Process, which helped track service of notice, virtual courts, e-payment and automated emails, he further remarked.On the digitisation of records at the Orissa High Court, he remarked,"Within a year, 70 to 80 percent of all Orissa courts would be paperless. Fortunately, my succeeding CJs have taken it forward. Orissa is the only High Court to do it. Kerala is now attempting it. We now have benches of Orissa High Court in virtually every district. This could have been done in Karnataka also.".On being asked whether computerisation will help persons languishing in prisons for a long time get bail sooner, Justice Muralidhar replied,"Computerisation won’t help grant of bail. The persons you mentioned are charged under UAPA, which makes bail close to impossible, since burden is on accused to show there is no prima facie case against him.".On the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in courts, Justice Muralidhar said, "We should be extremely cautious and there should be proper debate and study before we go in that direction."