The Chief Justice of India Hon'ble Mr. Justice Tirath Singh Thakur has very kindly given his consent to inaugurate the Centre For Information Technology of the High Court of Judicature at Allahabad at 6.30 PM on 12 March 2016. This function would be attended by judges of the Supreme Court, Chief Justices of other High Courts and the Chief Justice and judges of the Allahabad High Court.
The building consists of a basement and two floors each having an area of 20,000 sq. feet. It was in a very bad condition so much so that the basement was flooded with water upto five feet for the last ten years. With the help of expert teams of the Central Government and the State Government, the basement was cleaned with adequate arrangements to ensure that the water did not again flood the basement. The building today stands out as one of the most impressive and modern Information Technology Centre building in the country. It has a state of the art Data Centre equipped with redundant power supply from two independent feeders, fire detection, fire suppression, VRV Cooling system and security systems.
The Centre for Information Technology has a basement which has a capacity to store about 30 lac files. 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.
This 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 State Government has made available this building adjacent to the High Court at Allahabad. 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 almost 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.
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 digitization, now being undertaken, will make it possible for any person to access the records of the decided cases. This is a step to make the process transparent and user friendly for all the stakeholders including the lawyers and the litigants.
