Karnataka courts to hear undertrials via video-conferencing

BENGALURU: City court and jail authorities have hit upon a solution to deal with the problems in transporting undertrial prisoners for court hearings -stop transporting them.
Instead, the Karnataka e-Governance Department is installing high definition video conferencing systems linking the City Civil and Sessions Court and other subordinate courts to the Central Jail in Bengaluru and other state prisons to allow for remote hearings.

The state government has started this project for speedy disposal of cases, an official in the state e-Governance Department said, adding that conducting hearings by video conferencing will also reduce the expenditure incurred in producing thousands of undertrials before various courts. The primary problem with transporting undertrials is that there are not enough reserve police made available to escort hundreds of detainee to and from court every day . Besides it is a slow process expensive a n once in a while some inmates spot an opportunity to pull an escape.

“Through this (video-conferencing), we can stop everything,“ said Judge TG Shiva Shankaregowda, central project coordinator (computers) at the Karnataka High Court.

Karnataka has more than 18,000 undertrials, including about 3,500 in the Bengaluru Central Jail. From this prison alone, about 700 undertrials have to be produced before courts daily but on any day only 100 reserve police are made available, he said. So only 300 undertrials can be produced before courts on a day at a cost of `700 per person.

Conducting hearings by video-conferencing will remove these problems. “As a pilot project, we introduced video-conferencing in two court halls... It will be installed in the remaining 291 court halls in the state at a cost of Rs.25 crore,“ said Shiva Shankaregowda.

The pilot project was started on July 7 in the City Civil and Sessions Court in Bengaluru and I Additional Court in Mangaluru. Presently, more than 25 cases are heard everyday through video-conferencing at the Bengaluru Central Jail.

“Through this video-conferencing system, we are able to (have hearings) in the prison itself; it saves a lot of manpower and time and risk in producing the undertrials to court,“ said VS Raju, Assistant Deputy Inspector General (Prisons).