Reevaluate how electronic docs be authenticated: HC to courts

The Delhi High Court has held that courts ought to reevaluate the manner by which they require electronic documents to be authenticated.
Dealing with a case relating to a loan default, Justice Pratibha M Singh observed that merely because a printout of statement of an account is filed as secondary evidence with necessary certificate, does not make it less valid.
The court's observations were made while setting aside a trial court order, which had dismissed the recovery suit of the ICICI Bank on grounds that it failed to file the original loan recall notice.
The high court, however, observed, "Despite all the original documents being on record, the trial court proceeded on an erroneous assumption that the original loan recall notice dated February 11, 2014, has not been placed on record and only a photocopy of the same has been placed on record.

"It is actually unfathomable as to how the loan recall notice, issued to the Defendants, could be produced in original by the plaintiff bank. The original of the said notice would obviously be with the Defendants. This can hardly be a ground to dismiss the suit of the Plaintiff bank by adopting a technical approach," the high court added.
It stated that courts have a duty to safeguard public money and by applying completely incorrect principles of procedure and evidence, suits filed by these financial institutions cannot be dismissed in this manner.

Justice Singh gave extensive reasoning for holding that the trial court had applied the provisions of the Evidence Act in a completely incorrect manner.

The high court also delved into the way accounts are maintained nowadays and the resultant classification into primary and secondary evidence.
"Section 34 of the Evidence Act clearly provides that the books of accounts maintained in electronic form are relevant. Under Section 62 of the Evidence Act, original documents constitute primary evidence. In the context of electronic evidence, printouts of electronic documents are considered as secondary," it said.
The court noted that a judicial notice needs to be taken of the fact that most accounts today are not maintained in paper form, but electronic form.
"The primary evidence could be the server on which the statement of accounts is stored. These servers may store the statement of accounts of multiple clients in the hard drive. It would be an impossibility to require the Plaintiff bank to produce the hard drive of the server in every suit for recovery filed by it," it observed.