India’s First Cyber Forensic Laboratory (CFL) Inaugurated at Tripura High Court

The first Cyber Forensic Laboratory (CFL) of India was established in Tripura on 11 August 2013. The lab was established at the Tripura High Court and the purpose of the lab is to facilitate information related to court cases. The CFL was inaugurated by Supreme Court judge Justice Madan B. Lokur.

Features of the Cyber Forensic Laboratory (CFL)

• The CFL would offer automatic SMS alert to not just the lawyers, but also the litigants regarding the details of the court case. In case, the petitioner or the lawyer is absent on the day of trial, SMS alert would go to the concerned parties through the CFL.
• CFL would facilitate decentralisation of the legal services in India.
• As a part of CFL, the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) will also be developed under the supervision of the Supreme Court. The information related to the legal services, judicial actions as well as the court cases will be available through NJDG. NJDG would be operationalised by January 2014.
• CFL is the part of e-court programme.

The training regarding this new system would be given to thousands of judicial officials. As of now, 13000 judicial officers, which also include the judges, have already been trained about e-court system. As a part of the modernisation, video conferencing systems are also being expanded in India. Under the video conferencing system, any lawyer or judge will be able to talk to the accused who is lodged in the jails.

The e-court programme in India was first introduced in the year 2007 when Justice Madan B. Lokur pioneered video conferencing systems between the Tihar jail and Delhi High Court. Also, 140 district courts in India out of 620 have their own websites for providing information related to the cases. E-court schemes of all kinds facilitate faster disposal of pending cases in the courts.

It is important to know that the states of Manipur, Meghalaya and Tripura got their individual high courts in March 2013. All the seven northeastern states- Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Manipur, Tripura and Assam were formerly under the Gauhati High Court with benches in the state capitals. Sikkim had its own separate high court.