Parliament Watch: No plan to amend anti-defection law; ₹42.79 crore spent on video conferencing facilities in courts

Parliament on Thursday saw replies to questions on the Tenth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, the money spent on video conferencing facilities in courts and instances of personal information of Right to Information (RTI) applicants being made public.

In response to a question by Andhra Pradesh MP S Niranjan Reddy, the Law Ministry revealed that as per data compiled by the Supreme Court's Registry, only 51% of court complexes in the country have a library.

The Ministry further said that under the eCourts Phase II Project, a component called the Judicial Knowledge Management System (JKMS) for promoting computerisation of court libraries has been developed that includes an Integrated Library Management Software (ILMS). This software caters to all functions of library acquisition, circulation, catalogue generation etc.

In the Judges’ Library at the Supreme Court, Koha, an open-source library management software, has been deployed.

ILMS is being used as a digital library wherein content in digital forms is ported and can be accessed by its beneficiaries online. Legal research documents, committee/commission reports, law articles, circulars, orders, High Court Rules, etc can all be ported to the ILMS digital library.

Karnataka MP GC Chandrashekhar asked in the Rajya Sabha whether the Central government was aware that toppling of state governments across the country has become common, and whether it planned to strengthen the anti-defection laws.

Union Law Minister Kiren Rijiju said that owing to the Tenth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, which provides for disqualification of elected members on the grounds of defection to another political party, there has been a substantive decrease in cases of defection and therefore it needs no amendment.

"In the recent past, owing to implementation of the Tenth Schedule there has been substantive decrease in the defection cases. Since, the provisions of the Tenth Schedule have stood the test of time and several judicial scrutinies, there does not appear to be any need for carrying out any amendments as of now," he said.

Bihar Rajya Sabha MP Prof Manoj Kumar Jha asked, among other questions, whether the government was aware of cases where personal information of RTI applicants has been made public, and if so, what action was taken in that regard.

The answer stated that as per Section 8(1)(j) of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, it is not obligatory for public information officers to give any personal information to citizens when it is not in public interest and would unwarrantedly invade the privacy of an individual.

Further, it stated that the government has, from time to time, issued guidelines and office memorandums to bring to notice to all ministries and departments that personal information of an RTI applicant should not be disclosed.

The answer also revealed that 22,442 cases were pending in the Central Information Commission. Out of these, 3,264 are complaints and 19,178 are second appeals.

Senior Advocate Vivek Tankha, Rajya Sabha MP from Madhya Pradesh, sought to know the the total amount of money spent on building infrastructure for virtual functioning of courts during the last three years.

It was revealed that under Phase-II of the eCourts Project, out of a total outlay of ₹1,670 crore, the government has released a sum of ₹1,668.43 crore as on March 31, 2022 to various organizations involved in the implementation of the project.

Total funds spent on video conferencing infrastructure such as video conferencing equipment, VC cabins, VC licenses and document visualizers, amount to ₹42.79 crore. Year-wise release of funds is as follows:

To a question by Bihar MP Sushil Kumar Modi, it was revealed that verdicts passed by the Supreme Court in 14 subject categories are being translated into any of the related 14 vernacular languages.

A total of 538 judgments have been translated in the last three years. The year-wise data is as follows:

Further, Supreme Court Vidhik Anuwad Software (SUVAS), an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based software has the ability to translate judicial domain documents from English to Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Bengali, Urdu and vice-versa.

The High Courts have been requested to use SUVAS for translation on an experimental basis, for testing and training. 16,098 documents have been translated during the testing period.