District Court Digitization Hubs Inaugurated in 10 Dists in Odisha

Cuttack: The District Court Digitization Hubs (DCDHs) were inaugurated in 10 districts of Odisha on Monday.

Chief Justice of India, Dr Justice D Y Chandrachud inaugurated the DCDHs in virtual mode in presence of Dr. S. Muralidhar, Chief Justice and the Judges of High Court of Orissa.

Justice D. Dash, Chairman and the members of the RRDC Committee of the High Court were present on the occasion. The District Judges, Judicial Officers, Office Bearers of the Bar Associations and the officials of the district administration attended the event through virtual mode.

Space Management is one of the major challenges for the Courts. Constant inflow of papers into the Courts creates huge problem in storage and much of the manpower, office hours and office space is consumed for storage of the case records. Procuring physical records for grant of certified copies, prevention of damage to the records, safe-keeping of records of lower Courts, reconstruction of damaged records are challenging tasks in physical storage of records. To overcome these problems the concept of digitization was introduced by the e-Committee, Supreme Court of India. By the process of digitization the risks of damage and misplacement of documents from the physical case records can be avoided and softcopies of the records can be safely stored for easy access for various purposes such as hearing in paperless courts, grant of certified copies etc. Besides, digitization is the only solution to the humongous problem of space crunch.

Digitization of records has been taken up by the High Court of Orissa, both in the High Court and the District Courts. Initially, 4 District Court Digitization Centres (DCDC) were set up on a pilot basis in Cuttack, Ganjam, Sambalpur and Balasore on 30th April, 2021. As on 30th November, 2022 5,94,237 records of District Courts containing 5,58,13,771 pages have been scanned in the 4 DCDCs. Out of them 4,62,618 records containing 3,37,87,583 pages have been uploaded on the server. Due to encouraging results from the 4 DCDCs the High

Court of Orissa decided to upgrade these Centres into District Court Digitization Hubs (DCDH). Further, DCDHs have been inaugurated in 10 more Districts namely Angul, Bhadrak, Jharsuguda, Kalahandi, Keonjhar, Koraput, Malkangiri, Mayurbhanj, Nayagarh and Sonepur. These hubs will cover digitization works of all the 30 districts of the state.

Each DCDH would be assigned with the digitization work of the nearby Districts. The objective of the DCDH would be to digitize the disposed of case records of the parent Districts as well as that of the nearby assigned Districts.

The scanning work for the paperless courts of the said nearby Districts would also be taken up in the concerned DCDH, according to a press release issued by the High Court.