The Orissa High Court has digitized as many as 6,97,838 legacy (disposed of cases) records including 3,01,872 civil and 3,95,966 criminal records for posterity.

Correspondingly, 3,51,452 digitized records have been shredded, which include 1,42,817 Civil and 2,08,635 Criminal Records.

Besides the legacy records, the digitization of pending records has also been taken up from 2nd June, 2022. As of 23 December, 2022 about 74,904 pending records have been digitized, the High Court registry said on Thursday.

With more and more legacy (disposed) records being consigned to the record rooms regularly, there was an urgent need to find a solution for managing space within these record rooms.

In early 2021, with a view to addressing the enormous challenge of storage, preservation and retrieval of the ever growing corpus of legacy records in the Record Rooms, the process of scanning of legacy records was given an impetus by simultaneously establishing three scanning hubs in the High Court, it said.

The idea was to ensure easy access of digital records and minimum movement of physical records, thereby reducing the exposure to ancillary hazards.

This led to the conceptualization and establishment of the High Court’s Record Room Digitization Centre (RRDC). Separate spaces were dedicated in the RRDC for the Court’s Civil and Criminal Record Rooms as well as for the work of their scanning and digitization.

Dedicated staff are positioned both in the Civil and Criminal Record Rooms, while the scanning and digitization is looked after by one of the empanelled vendors of National Informatics Centre Services (NICSI).

The servers containing repositories of the scanned records are maintained with utmost precision and are made accessible from all locations of the RRDC as well as the Courtrooms and offices of the High Court.

The overall supervision of the work of RRDC has been entrusted to a Judicial Officer who is designated as the Registrar Records. ICT equipment and state of the art amenities have been provided in the RRDC to maintain consistency in the process of storing, scanning and retrieval of legacy records.

Simultaneously, shredding of digitized records was taken up in order to manage the space for daily inflow of legacy records into the Record Rooms. Meanwhile more than a year has gone by and there has been considerable progress in the digitization and shredding of Legacy Records of the High Court. On an average more than one lakh cases are filed and about 85,000 cases are disposed of in the High Court every year.