March 12, 2018
Pune

The Joint committee of Hon'ble High Court Judges visited C-DAC Pune on 10th March 2018 to examine the technical aspects of the draft rules for Reception, Retrieval, Authentication and Preservation of electronic records under the Indian Evidence Act. The delegation of hon'ble Judges from High Courts included the following dignitaries

• Hon'ble Shri Justice Hemant Gupta, The Chief Justice, High Court of Madhya Pradesh
• Hon'ble Shri Justice A. S. Oka, Judge, Bombay High Court
• Hon'ble Shri Justice Rajesh Bindal, Judge, High Court of Punjab & Haryana
• Hon'ble Shri Justice Dr. S. Muralidhar, Judge, High Court of Delhi
• Hon'ble Shri Justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw, Judge, High Court of Delhi
• Hon'ble Shri Justice Rajiv Narain Raina, Judge, High Court of Punjab and Haryana
• Hon'ble Shri Justice A. K. Menon, Judge, Bombay High Court
• Shri S. M. Modak, Hon'ble the Principal District and Sessions Judge, Pune

The joint committee of Hon'ble High Court Judges has drafted the electronic evidence rules in order to supplement the Code of Civil Procedure, Code of Criminal Procedure and the Evidence Act and to ensure that the legal admissibility of electronic evidence in the criminal proceedings. Dr. Dinesh Katre, Senior Director, C-DAC, Pune who coordinated this meeting with the Joint Committee of High Court Judges said that the research and development teams in C-DAC had already identified the need for harmonizing the Evidence Act with the Information Technology Act 2000/2008 in order to accommodate electronic evidences in the court of law, and a number of software tools have been prototyped for the encryption, extraction, secure acquisition, preservation and retrieval of electronic evidence in the form of mobile data, message chat, emails, social media activity and computer hard disks. The C-DAC team shared their experience of establishing certified Trusted Digital Repository as per the ISO standards with the Joint Committee. Col. Asheet K. Nath (Retd.), Executive Director, C-DAC (Corporate) said that the teams in C-DAC are already involved in the training of judicial staff to equip them with the required technical skill sets for digital evidence gathering. He said that C-DAC has state-of-the-art technical capabilities in cyber forensic, electronic signature (e-sign) and digitization to support the judiciary in its endeavor.

For more information:

Dr. Dinesh Katre
Senior Director & HoD
Human Centred Design & Computing Group
C-DAC, 5th Flr., Innovation Park, Panchavati,
Pashan, Pune 411008
Mobile: 9922992746
e-mail: dinesh[at]cdac[dot]in