The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Electronic display boards to be installed in High Court

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, May 22, 2006

Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Electronic display boards to be installed in High Court

B.S. Ramesh

The boards will display the cases that are being heard

BANGALORE: Courts in India are crowded places. In Bangalore, the four court complexes — the Karnataka High Court, the district and sessions courts, the magistrate courts and the traffic courts at Mayo Hall — are almost always full of people.

Advocates and their clients are present in the court when their case is listed in the daily cause list for hearing. However, when they reach the courts, they find it difficult to ascertain when their case will be called.

They have to either depend on the advocates already present in the court or the court officer to know which case is being heard and when their case will be called.

The lack of proper information not only frustrates people but also leads to overcrowding of court halls as advocates and their clients sit in the court halls till their case is called.

All this may soon be a thing of the past at least in the Karnataka High Court if it goes ahead with the installation of electronic display boards in each of the court halls and at three other places on the premises.

S.R. Bannurmath, senior judge of the Karnataka High Court and in-charge of the computerisation programme, told The Hindu that the High Court had decided to install boards outside all the 36 court halls to display the case that was being heard. After a case was over — disposed of, dismissed, adjourned — the next case will be flashed on the screen of the display board.

He said the system had been so designed that the cases listed for the day would be fed into the computer and when the court officer called for a case, he would have to press a button on the keyboard of his computer. The computer would be connected to the display board and it would

flash the case that was called.

The system had been successfully tested and it would be initially installed in the High Court. Apart from the 36 court halls, the boards would be installed in each of the two halls housing the advocates association and at another hall on the ground floor of the High Court where the advocates and their clients sit.

Mr. Bannurmath said the new system would be more sophisticated and easy to operate than an earlier system where display boards had to be manually operated. The system was likely to be introduced shortly. He said the server of the High Court was being upgraded and once this was completed, other IT-related programmes would be taken up.

Lower courts

He said the cause list of cases of all lower courts in the State was being put on the website and the advocates and clients could go through them to ascertain the status of their cases. As the volume of cases in the lower courts was high, it would not be feasible to introduce display boards there.

However, the cases being heard in the lower courts were being monitored by the High Court as each case heard was being entered in the computer by an official of the lower court. At the end of the day, the number of cases heard by each judge was entered in the computer. This, Mr. Bannurmath said, had helped in better monitoring by the High Court of the functioning of the lower courts.

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