India’s First Cyber Forensic Lab starts Journey in Tripura

On the eve of Monday of this current week an official declared that India's first Cyber Forensic Laboratory (CFL) has now been set up in Tripura. It is currently situated at the Tripura High Court, where it will be responsible to provide all sorts of court case related information.

While talking with the IANS, a certain high rank law official said, "From the CFL, automatic SMS alert would go to both lawyers and the litigant about the fate of the court case. If any lawyer or the petitioner remains absent on the day of trial, the SMS alert would go to all concerned.”

Last Sunday Justice Madan B. Lokur, the honorable judge of the Supreme Court, inaugurated the CFL with great pleasure. It’s worth mentioning here that in earlier days Mr. Lokur was the chief justice of the Gauhati High Court.

Here we are adding a small excerpt from what Mr. Lokur said while expressing his supreme joy over the introduction of this lab.

“We want decentralization of legal services across the country. It is difficult to control everything from Delhi. High courts in the states would look after the lower courts to dispose the pending cases in the quickest possible time.

A National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) is being developed under the Supreme Court's supervision. All information about legal services, court cases and judicial actions would be available from the NJDG.

So far, 13,000 judicial officers, including judges, have been trained about the e-court system and to equip them with the ongoing modernization of legal services. Several thousand judicial officers would be given training about this new system.”

It has to be added here that as per the early estimation the NJDG would be start functioning by January 2014. Mr. Lokur added that the government has started to give priorities to include advanced technologies in the judging system. It is vastly expanding the range of the facilities like conducting an online trial or video conferencing systems across the whole country.

The good part is with the help of this system any judge or lawyer will be able to talk to the accused lodged in jails while sitting in the court itself. Definitely it will speed up the whole process, which is need of the moment for sure.

In 2007 Lokur introduced video conferencing systems between Tihar jail and Delhi High Court for the very first time. He is so rightly called the pioneer of the e-court programme in India. So he was indeed the right person to inaugurate country’s first Cyber Forensic Lab.

He added that 140 district courts have already set up their own websites to offer case related information when needed and other courts are in the process of following the same in coming days. It is easily understandable that all e-court schemes would help the responsible judges to take appropriate action for quick disposal of pending cases, which are listed in various courts all over the country.

"With this new system of trial and administrative works, the litigants will be immensely benefited. It will save both time and money to get quick justice and prompt disposal of cases," Lokur concluded.

Deepak Gupta, who is the current Chief Justice of Tripura High Court and renowned Justice Mr. Subhashish Talapatra was also present there and spoke good words about the lab itself. It should be mentioned here that in March 2013 separate high courts were established in important states like Tripura, Meghalaya and Manipur.