Chandigarh, March 6
The Punjab and Haryana High Court will soon provide the case status to litigants through a short message service (SMS) as it gets ready to launch an ‘SMS-based query system’.
The idea is to provide convenience to thousands of litigants so that they can get to know of their case status while sitting at home.
In keeping with the principle of ‘administration of justice on the doorstep’, this service will also ensure that the litigants are not misguided by the lawyers.
With Punjab and Haryana having one of the highest tele-density in the country, the SMS-based query system will prove to be a boon for the litigants.
As of now, the litigants can know of their case status through the official website of the high court.
However, a vast majority of litigants is from rural areas of Punjab and Haryana, they are unable to use the Internet.
Official sources told The Tribune that the high court had already floated tenders in this regard.
The scope of work includes installation of hardware, system software, application software, setup and customisation and configuration of services, while the court will provide data contents and query to access the contents.
“Data security will remain the prime concern, though we are also open to any model for SMS-based solution,” said the sources.
The system will so work that the litigant will send an SMS query in a predefined format to a predefined mobile number.
The message will then be received by the software and processed to generate a reply based on information to be extracted from a database server and then send reply as an
SMS.
