‘Allow manual filing until e-filing glitches are fixed’
It has been a year since the Bombay High court made efiling of civil and criminal cases compulsory, and refused to accept manual submissions. But lawyers are still facing a lot of glitches and are now requesting the authority to allow manual filing until the system is smooth.
The Bar Association of Bombay City Civil Court and Sessions Court addressed a letter to the principal sessions judge, on January 2, pointing several difficulties faced by the lawyers and pleading to allow offline submissions.
“While the introduction of e-court filing has undoubtedly brought advancements to our legal processes, it is essential to acknowledge the practical difficulties encountered by advocates in its implementation. Issues such as frequent server downtimes, website malfunctions, challenges in the oathtaking process, and varying internet speeds have been persistently affecting the smooth functioning of the ecourt filing system,” reads the letter written by the president of Bar Association, Ravi Jadhav.
Besides, lawyers from the family court initiated a campaign wherein a letter signed by around 200 lawyers was sent to various authorities.
The letter states: “The expeditious completion of filing
within 15 minutes during physical filing sharply contrasts with the extended timelines associated with e-filing, attributed to server speed fluctuations and occasional downtimes. Subsequent to efiling, the initial scrutiny spans protracted two to three months, with the removal of objections consuming an additional one to two months to secure the first returnable date.
Meanwhile, advocate Munira Palanpurwala highlighted several practice glitches while submitting petitions online. “The online filing system is very cumbersome and time consuming, as firstly the filing is done under specific titles which actually do not stand as the head under which one is seeking relief. Moreover there are different pages, which are supposed to be filed with details, however, the drop down arrow does not show options but those fields are marked as compulsory.”
“The entire petition is supposed to be scanned an uploaded, which is quite time consuming. For every single petition we are supposed to video record oaths. Further, after completion of these formalities we are supposed to submit hard copy by taking a number and standing in a queue. So in short to sum it up the online procedure has not reduced filing time but increased the same making it more complicated.”