The Chief Justice of India Hon'ble Mr. Justice Tirath Singh Thakur inaugurated the Centre For Information Technology of the High Court of Judicature at Allahabad at 6.30 PM on 12 March 2016 in the presence of many Judges of the Supreme Court, Chief Justices of other High Courts and the Chief Justice and Judges of the Allahabad High Court. The Chief Justice of India also inaugurated the website of Sesquicentennial of Allahabad High Court http://sesquicentennial.allahabadhighcourt.in.
The Centre for Information Technology building today stands out as one of the most impressive and modern Information Technology Centre building in the country. The building consists of a basement and two floors each having an area of 20,000 sq. feet. The ground floor of the Centre houses a Data Centre, cabins for the technical officers, two Video-Conferencing Halls, lounge, cabins for the two Judicial Officers associated with computerisation and the e-Courts Project and cubicals for the associated staff. The digitization of the High Court records would take place on the first floor of the Centre. The basement has a capacity to store about 30 lac files.
The State Government made available a building adjacent to the High Court at Allahabad. The basement was in a very bad condition so much so that it was flooded with water upto five feet for the last ten years. The Chief Justice of the High Court constituted a Committee of Justice Dilip Gupta as a Chairperson and Justice Anjani Kumar Mishra as a member for remodeling this building. Immediate steps were taken by the Committee to ensure that in the first instance the water was removed from the basement and adequate protection was provided. Help of expert teams of the Central Government and the State Government was also sought and the basement was cleaned with adequate arrangements to ensure that the water did not flood the basement. A covered pathway has been constructed to provide connectivity to the Data Centre building from the main High Court building. Civil and electrical works, including renovation of the building, networking, VRV based Air Conditioning System, CCTV and biometric card based security system, fire fighting equipments are complete. To provide and ensure uninterrupted power supply to the Data Centre building, a separate power supply from two independent feeders has been taken. Dedicated HT and LT rooms have been constructed to house electrical panels for three 400 KVA transformers. Two silent generator sets of 500 KVA and 125 KVA capacity and two Online UPS each of 200 KVA capacity with three hours power backup facility have also been installed.
Servers, scanners, and other related items/equipments have been installed by SHCIL and the pilot project has started. Content Management System (CMS) and Document Management System (DMS) have been customised according to the requirements of the High Court.
The project to digitize approximately one crore decided case files of the High Court in one year was conceptualized by the Chief Justice of High Court, Dr. Justice Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud. This was considered necessary because not only space in the Court building was required to store large number of office files but it was becoming extremely difficult to trace out these files. At a modest average of about 50 pages in each weeded file, it is expected that 50 crores pages would need to be digitized in one year. This would mean that about 35000 weeded files would have to be made available each day. The Stock Holding Corporation of India was selected for the scanning and digitization work.
The Chief Justice of High Court also constituted a Committee to digitize the Court records. This Committee consists of Justice Dilip Gupta as Chairperson and Justice Ajai Lamba, Justice Devendra Kumar Arora and Justice Anjani Kumar Mishra as members.
Digitization process consists basically of two application software sub-processes. They are Document Tracking System and Document Management Solution. Document Tracking System provides a unified, consolidated and collaborative platform, binding together disparate legacy systems and documents of the Organization. It accomplishes the task of tracking individual cases files, authenticate and authorize various levels of users with the assigned roles, provides features like search, add and view documents dynamically. The process of handing over and taking over the documents will be tracked online and monitored using this system. The physical Document Management Solution will give a real time dash board to the officials about the status of the documents. The DMS software has many modules.
In the past, scanning/digitization was being done from a well established Scanning/Digitization Centre of the High Court with High Speed Book2net Scanners and a SAN Storage Server of approximately 288 TB capacity. Scanning/ digitization of the Case files and Administrative files is going on and about 70 thousand case files containing 30 lacs pages have already been scanned/digitized.
At Lucknow, the work of scanning and digitization would be carried out at the newly constructed building of the High Court. Approximately 28000 sq. ft. built-in area has been marked and developed for the infrastructure required for the scanning and digitization work and the establishment of a Data Centre and other related infrastructure. State of the art Data Centres/Digitization Centres with Disaster Recovery Site at Allahabad and Lucknow are being set up and would be functional shortly.
The process of scanning and digitization now being undertaken will certainly not only make it possible to access the records of the decided cases but will also address the problems relating to shortage of office space in the High Court building. As soon as the records of the decided cases are scanned/digitized, steps would be taken to scan and digitize the records of the pending cases.
The Computer Committee consisting of Justice Dilip Gupta as Chairperson and Justice Ajai Lamba, Justice Anjani Kumar Mishra and Justice Yashwant Varma as members, has undertaken the work on the ground floor of the building relating to the computerisation of the High Court. The Steering Committee consisting of Justice Dilip Gupta as Chairperson and Justice Anjani Kumar Mishra and Justice P.K. Srivastava as members is looking after the e-Courts Project of the Supreme Court of India.