Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Majhi on Saturday said the State Government is committed to provide all assistance including financial, administrative and technological to the State’s judicial mechanism.
Majhi, while inaugurating the Centre for Judicial Archives of the Orissa High Court, said the Indian Judiciary has brought laurels in the international sphere.
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The Archives Centre will be a preserver of not only judicial records but also of culture, he further said.
The significance of setting up the Centre for Judicial Archives, as many endangered important historic records of the Court failed to attract the attention of State Archives for their preservation, Chief Justice Chakradhari Sharan Singh said on the occasion.
The Archive is meant for care, conservation and consultation of the oldest records. The Archive is not a destination for the elite, rather it will be a place for the marginalized to know that facts of their importance have been preserved in this Centre.
Chief Justice Singh thanked the State for not only providing Rs.38 crores for construction of the Centre but also for providing all kinds of assistance as and when sought for by the Court.
The Centre was inaugurated by Mohan Charan Majhi, Chief Minister in presence of Justice Chakradhari Sharan Singh, Chief Justice of Orissa High Court, Prithiviraj Harichandan, Minister, Law and Judges of the High Court of Orissa.
Among others, the Advocate General, Pitambar Acharya, the Deputy Solicitor General of India for the High Court of Orissa, Prasanna Kumar Parhi, President, Secretary and the office bearers of High Court Bar Association, Senior Advocates and Government officials attended the function.
The Centre was set up to safeguard and conserve the fragile judicial records of the High Court and district courts across Odisha. Till date, the Centre has preserved approximately 75,000 judicial records predating 1950. Out of these, over 4,132 files – comprising nearly 84,888 sheets – have undergone scientific conservation, and 1,151 files have been digitized.
This achievement is monumental, not just for its scale but for its significance. Modern record-keeping in India began during the administration of the English East India Company, but the archives of that era lacked accessibility and systematic preservation. It is only in the post-independence period that the value of archives as repositories of authentic history gained recognition.
Judicial records in India remained an untouched realm until May 2022, when the High Court of Orissa took the unprecedented step of establishing a judicial archives center. This initiative emerged from the discovery of invaluable 19th and early 20th-century records in the courts of Odisha— records written in English, Odia, Persian, Telugu, Hindi, and Bengali. These documents are not just artifacts; they are treasures that hold the power to reconstruct the judicial and legal history of our state.
