COVID-19 gave opportunity to put judiciary's techno infra on robust basis: Justice Chandrachud

Supreme Court Justice D Y Chandrachud Wednesday said the COVID-19 pandemic has given an opportunity to place the technological infrastructure of the Indian judiciary on a robust basis.

He said that soon after the pandemic descended, we were able to create an infrastructure for launching video conferencing in the Supreme Court, high courts and in over 17,000 courts in the country which is an indicator of what we have been able to achieve.

Justice Chandrachud, who is the chairperson of the Supreme Court e-committee, said: The pandemic has descended on us without any notice but the pandemic has given us an opportunity to place the technological infrastructure of Indian judiciary on a robust basis. The question today is not whether we should adopt technology but how well do we adopt technology.

While e-inaugurating the second phase of the Virtual Court project in Delhi via webinar, he said that online payment of traffic violation challans tremendously improved the efficiency of the system.

The virtual courts 2.0 project was undertaken by the e-Committee of Supreme Court, IT teams of the Delhi High Court, district courts here and the Delhi Traffic Police, which involves capturing of traffic violations via cameras and the resolution of the challans generated thereafter.

As of today, the Delhi traffic police has in position 389 cameras across NCR of Delhi to digitally capture the traffic violations involving over-speeding and red light jumping.

During the webinar, he said that since the two virtual courts were inaugurated a while ago, challans of Rs 95,000 have been paid online probably in the last 15 minutes.

Justice Chandrachud said the virtual courts have been able to liberate the energies of 20 judges of the Delhi district judiciary who otherwise have been manning the physical courts.

So 20 judicial officers who were dedicating their work to these petty offences of traffic violations are now being able to dedicate their time to core judicial work, he said, adding that the Delhi Police can now devote their time to core traffic duties.

Justice Chandrachud, who said this is a citizen centric exercise, added that the example of Delhi is being replicated elsewhere in the country and maharashtra is set to go online this Friday with virtual challan courts and Haryana, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh are on their way.

He also informed that various high courts have framed model rules for conducting virtual hearings and have sent it to the Supreme Court and added that right to know of public and media is crucial in a democracy.

Delhi High Court Chief Justice D N Patel, who was part of the programme, said the initiative has been successful as the virtual court has disposed of 7,30,789 challans as on May 7, resulting in the online collection of fine amounting to Rs 89,41,67,812.

He said the second model will have camera clippings of the violation and if anyone has any issue, they can point it out to the court and virtual courts will benefit people as no one has time to go to courts.

Supreme Court Judges- Justices S K Kaul, S Ravindra Bhat and Sanjeev Khanna, Delhi High Court judges- Justices Rajiv Shakdher, Sanjeev Sachdeva, Prathiba M Singh and Navin Chawla were also part of the event. Besides them, Delhi Police Commissioner S N Shrivastava was also present.

The first virtual court was inaugurated on July 26, 2019 and it deals digitally with 'on-spot traffic challans' generated by the Delhi Traffic Police via the E-Challan application developed by the NIC.