Karnataka High Court: Problems with the poor quality of uploaded judgments

To Karnataka High Court,

I run a website called Indian Kanoon http://indiankanoon.org that aggregates judgments from Supreme Court as well as all high courts. It extracts text from all judgments and provides a free state-of-art search functionality.

Currently judgments provided by Karnataka High Court on the website http://www.karnatakajudiciary.kar.nic.in/ are scanned copies of printed text. The image quality is so bad that it is hard to extract any text from these judgments and are often unreadable. Considering Karnataka High Court serves a very critical role in Indian democracy and many judgments have very far reaching consequences, such technical problem has created a huge roadblock in people looking into High Court judgments.

It is not possible for people trying to search Karnataka High Court judgments by keywords as many people will need to identify cases of interest. A technology impediment makes searching almost impossible for Karnataka High Court judgments, where we know how much people today rely on search to identify relevant material.

This email is mainly to highlight the poor quality of uploaded judgments that is inhibiting a large section of people from accessing the law of the land. It would be better if judgments are uploaded in text format or the PDF files are created from text (and not from images as currently being done).

I wish and hope that this complaint will be looked into and the technical problem will be quickly solved. I would be very happy to help Karnataka High Court if it needs any technical advice in uploading the judgments.

Thanks,
Sushant Sinha.