Allahabad High Court organised first national conference of computer committees at Judicial Training & Research Institute, Lucknow on 20th and 21st January, 2018. On this occasion, a souvenir was also published. At the request of Justice Dileep Gupta, the then Chairman Computer Committee, I penned down the following article for the souvenir.
It narrates the work done at the Allahabad High Court, during my time in the computer committee.
Do you know, Penguin can fly.
'Penguins can fly?? … You must be joking?'
About a decade ago, the morning edition of British newspapers reported that while filming on King George Island, some 750 miles south of the Falkland Islands, the BBC Camera crew discovered a colony of Adélie penguins that could fly. The programme presenter had said:
'We'd been watching the penguins and filming them for days, without a hint of what was to come. But then the weather took a turn for the worse. It was quite amazing. Rather than getting together in a huddle to protect themselves from the cold, they did something quite unexpected, that no other penguins can do.'
The newspapers from the BBC sources had also reported,
'The film reveals nature's stunning glory exciting and unexpected ways, so much so that it defies belief. Not only did it create a vivid and emotional experience for the viewer, it also illustrated just how bold and simple Darwin's idea of natural selection was. The BBC viewers would be able to see that the penguins not only taking flight from the Antarctic wastes, but flying to the thousands of miles to the Amazonian rain forest to find winter sun.'
There was a BBC footage that showed penguins flying. This was to be, a part of its new natural history series, 'Miracles of Evolution'.
Alas, the date this news appeared in the morning edition of British newspapers was 1st April 2008. It was a fools' day prank and not true :-(
Nevertheless, penguins are miracles of evolution. They are a group of aquatic, flightless birds living almost exclusively in the southern hemisphere, especially in Antarctica; their wings are useless for flight: they have become flippers. They are well adapted to aquatic life. Their white belly and dark back camouflages them. A predator in the sea looking up at them from below has difficulty distinguishing between a white penguin belly and the reflective water surface. The dark back hides them from above.
Why We Adopted Open Source & Open Format
I am not repeating BBC prank. At some places, penguin does fly and Allahabad High Court is one of them.
Penguin is an official symbol of Linux. Allahabad High Court is a success story of Linux and open source applications. Penguin does fly here. This is what I most vividly remember of my association with the computer committee of the Court. Our website boasted,
'Allahabad High Court has taken a policy decision to work in Open Source Software and use open standards … Our Website is also best viewed in Firefox.'
Many asked us, why did we do so?
The beginning of the last century witnessed the emergence of a semi-clad Indian, referred to as 'half naked Fakir' by Winston Churchill. His philosophy was,
'Means are more important than the end: it is only with the right means that the desired end will follow.'
To the charge that 'means are after all means', he would say,
‘After all, means are everything.’
His name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi – known to the World as Mahatma Gandhi, father of our nation.
Gandhi's philosophy is deep rooted in law as well. In R Vs IRC Exparte Rossminster Ltd 1979 (3) All ELR 385, one of the greatest judge of 20th century, Lord Denning observed,
‘But it is fundamental in our law that the means that are adopted ... should be lawful means. A good end does not justify bad means.'
In today's World,
- The end is dissemination, communication, and retrieval of information; and
- The means are, how to achieve it, implement it, the kinds of software to use. the kinds of standards to adopt, the kind of formats to employ.
Open source and open format are good means and it is for this reason that we adopted them.
Stint In The Computer Committee
I became a judge in 1999 and soon became member of the Computer Committee; later Chairman of the same and continued till 2008. When I became part of Computer Committee, I realised that there were more computers than we had licenses for windows and MS Office. This was wrong. My first effort was to shift the machines to Linux and word processing to OpenOffice.Org suite. No one should accuse us of doing anything illegal. This is the principle that we stuck to.
To begin with, there was lot of opposition to Linux machines and open Office.Org suite but slowly every one realised its importance. Soon High Court employees started requesting us to install Linux in their home machines: considering that not many games were available – children could not waste time – there were no viruses and money was also saved as it entailed no expenditure on software.
Many Firsts
We set up our own web server, mail server, storage area network (SAN), database servers in our premises. Thus Allahabad High Court became the first court in the country to have successfully installed them: at that time the rest of the courts. Later some of the courts (including the Supreme Court) followed us and set up their servers though most of them still use NIC's.
Our web server is Linux based. It was taking lot of time to setup. After three weeks, I asked the supplier as to why there was delay. He answered that had we taken Windows based server it would have been installed in a day: Linux server was another cup of tea. He had not installed any: obviously he was taking time. It was installed after a month. But the waiting period was worth it. It never caused us any trouble.
We set up our own website - first for any court in India. New domain name was registered under (.in) registry and hosted on Court’s own web sever in our premises. Earlier, Web-Site of Allahabad High Court was hosted on NIC HQ Servers at New Delhi. At that time rest of the court website and still most of the courts have website on NIC server. New features such as case status, judgements/ orders, RSS feed, judgement headlines, other headlines, personal information system (PIS) of judicial officers of UP were added.
Our website was equipped with feed technology. The Judges were requested to provide headlines of approved for reporting (AFR) judgements. These headlines became available on RSS feed. Administrative decisions also became available on feed. Thus our website became first court website in the world to implement it. Even today, Chhattisgarh High Court is only other court to provide it. I remember telling this to computer staff to equip the website with feed technology and their question was, what was feed technology but when I explained to them they understood and implemented it.
In 2005, I had gone to Bangalore to give a talk in the global conference of Sun Micro system. There were participants from throughout the world. I did tell them why we had adopted open source and about our website. Most of the participants had not known about RSS feed and I was asked questions on it. Of course, the question that I still remember is that a young lady asked me if I was a normal judge. When I asked her to explain the word ‘normal judge’ She said that by normal judge she meant whether an average judge in India does kind of things that we were doing at Allahabad.
All relevant information was displayed on the website. Some important details are as follows:
- Advocates database: It contains details about advocates practicing at Allahabad High Court with their address, mobile numbers and enrollment number with various search options.
- Web Diary: It contains information about the holidays of the courts, important events, meetings, notifications for appearance in the Court, notifications related to transfer/appointment, roaster/constitution of Benches, recruitment, tender, speeches/articles, news from computer centre, etc. Reports / Recommendations, and minutes of meetings are available on the site if they are permitted for the public viewing.
- Publication: It contains Commemorative Volumes [100 Years - Centenary Celebration (1866-1966) Volume I & II and 125 Years - Post Centenary Silver Jubilee Celebration (1866-1991) Volume I & II Volume from Lucknow Bench], Rules (High Court Rules, District Court Rules, Service Rules), etc.
- Tenders: It contains information about the tenders published by the Court.
Information should be disseminated in the language of the people: English is not understood by our litigants. In order that our website should be more meaningful, Hindi website was also launched.
Desktops, laser printers and uninterrupted power supply (UPS) were provided to the private secretaries in chambers of the Judges and to the judgement writers. They uploaded the orders/ judgements after they were signed and sealed. They became available to public on Internet.
Later, certified copies started being issued from the judgements/ orders so uploaded. This reduced the time in issuing certified copy. We also ensured that once the certified copy was issued then they could not be changed except by passing another order.
The court rooms were fitted with thin clients and connected to the server so that bench secretaries (court masters) could upload dates in cases and status of the cases directly on the server. This gave real time disposal status in the evening.
Steps To Reduce Pendency
There was mismatch in the computer database and pending files. In order to reconcile it, physical verification was undertaken In Allahabad and Lucknow and the case status was updated. This helped in reaching the correct figures of pendency of cases.
Six-digit category code was put on each case file and cases were classified depending on its nature and subject matter. Bunches of cases pertaining to a particular subject matter including infructuous cases were prepared with the help of Computers. Such Bunches were listed in various Courts for quick disposal. This has resulted in quick disposal as well as reduction in pendency of cases.
Crime numbers are unique in criminal cases. A circular was issued that crime number has to be mentioned in every criminal case. Petitions under section 482 CrPC were not reported. They were also reported. The result was that every criminal case could be traced and with any criminal case all criminal cases arising out of same crime number were tagged. This resulted into reduction of similar petitions being filed as criminal writ petitions, criminal revisions and 482 petitions.
List of bunch cases were provided on the website. The judges were requested to connect the similar matters with the leading cases. This resulted in better bunching of cases.
Reports of different work were being generated weekly as well as monthly and progress was monitored. This helped in achieving our targets.
E- Committee Follows Allahabad High Court Initiative
E- Committee provided computers to be installed in the courts. Allahabad district was taken as the pilot project. The NIC provided computers with windows operating system. We refused to accept them as was contrary to our policy. We were threatened that our district courts will be left behind and we answered that we prefer to be left behind than to act contrary to our policy. Later, NIC provided computers with Linux. Later, E- Committee followed our initiative. Today, all courts in the districts have Linux desk tops.
Conclusion
Many projects were started; many were in pipeline but could not be completed. Among those that I remember are digitisation of library database and making ILR Allahabad series available on software. I wish the computer committee would do so now. I am happy to know that court records were digitised subsequently.
Computer Section is most hard working section of the court. It is the first to report and last to leave. I often signed the files at 9.30pm when In-charge Computer Section along with his assistant would come to get the signatures. Whatever little has been achieved in computerisation was because of the hard work of the people working there.
Much more was done than what I have narrated here. It has been a decade since I left the Committee. I have forgotten many things but this is the little that I remember.
#CourtMangement #Computerisation #OpenSource #OpenFormat #AllahabadHighCourt
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