We Need To Control 'Funny Stuff' Going On In YouTube, Judges Need To Be Trained: CJI DY Chandrachud

Chief Justice DY Chandrachud today expressed concern about video clips of hearings of Courts that are being streamed live on YouTube being shared widely on social media. 

The Chief Justice was speaking at the National Conference on Digitization in Bhubaneswar, Orissa. 

CJI Chandrachud spoke about the viral clip of a Bihar High Court Judge telling an IAS officer during a hearing that he is not appropriately dressed in a suit. The clip had gone viral on social media and people and criticised the judge for his alleged colonial mindset.  

"Today most High Courts are doing live streaming on YouTube, with the attending problems which we have been hearing in the earlier part of the presentation this morning by Chief Justice Murlidhar ..... You have these little clips about a Judge in the Patna High Court asking an IAS officer as to why he was not appropriately dressed in a suit, as opposed to being dressed in only a shirt and a trouser. Or somebody in the Gujarat High Court saying something about why a lawyer is not ready with her cases", Chief Justice Chandrachud who is a proponent of live streaming of court proceedings, said. 

The Chief Justice said that the funny stuff going on on YouTube needs to be controlled. "Lot of funny stuff is going on in the YouTube, which we need to control. Because this is serious stuff. What happens in the court is extremely serious stuff. Livestreaming that we are doing has a flip side", he said.

The CJI also said that Judges need to be trained to work in the age of social media. "We as judges need to be trained ourselves, because we are now working in the age of social media. Every word which we say in the Court is up on the public realm, which we realised when we are hearing the Constitution Bench arguments", he said.

"Very often citizens don't realise that what you say in the course of a hearing of a case is to open up a dialogue, doesn't reflect what you are ultimately going to decide necessarily in every case. In some cases it may and in some cases it may not. But people don't understand this at large. So live streaming, our interface with social media, places new demands on us as judges", the Chief Justice said.

The Chief Justice, among other things, said that there is a need to create a robust cloud infrastructure for live streaming. He said that with respect to cloud infrastructure, there is a need to have a national model, a centralised national cloud infrastructure. He said that is not needed only in terms of price discovery, but also for upscaling activities. He said that additional hardware for new courts and renewable energy are also required.