District courts’ record rooms need to be in better shape: HC

New Delhi: Despite learning that 52,000 files had already been eliminated, the Delhi High Court emphasized the need to improve the state of the district courts’ record rooms and mandated regular actions to simplify them.

The court said that it “cannot lose sight of the fact that the situation…,” in dismissing a PIL that brought attention to the problem.

is depressing, and the procedure of filtering out the records must be completed quickly and regularly observed.
The chief district and sessions judges of every district in Delhi were instructed by a bench consisting of Acting Chief Justice Manmohan and Justice Manmeet PS Arora to keep an eye on the weeding out of cases in their respective districts and take appropriate action. In this context, district judges were also requested to provide reports on a quarterly basis.

The High Court was assessing the actions made in response to its prior directives from January. It has issued a number of directives to digitize paper case records and strengthen electronic filing in district courts. It also ordered the high court’s registrar general to take action to require electronic filing of all civil and criminal complaint cases, and it mandated the installation of the centralized filing system in all district courts.

The bench was advised by the court administration that all district courts had switched to a centralized filing system.