High Courts follow environment friendly steps of SC, preserve paper

Taking cue from the Supreme Court initiative on protecting environment, different high courts in the country have started accepting petitions and affidavits on A4 size paper printed on both sides instead of the bigger legal sheets, officials said.

Chief Justice of India S A Bobde, who is hearing different PILs related to environment, has taken a series of steps both on the Judicial as well as on the administrative side at the Supreme Court which will result in protecting thousands of trees and huge amounts of water, they said.

From April 1, 2020, for judicial filings in the top court, all the stakeholders are required to use A4 size paper, to be printed on both the sides.

The officials at the top court said that this measure alone is estimated to save around 1.5 crore A4 sheets of paper per year.

With an average fresh filing of 41,010 matters (average of fresh filing for the years 2017, 2018 and 2019) with an average paper book size of 200 pages (800 pages for 4 paper books), with both side printing it is a conservative estimate that around 1.5 crore pages will be saved in a year.

Following the top court's initiative, different high courts including Calcutta, Karnataka, Sikkim, Tripura and recently Allahabad have adopted some of these environment friendly measures, the officials said.

Following the decision to use A4 size paper, with one and half line spacing and reduced margins instead of earlier legal size paper for judicial filings, is estimated to save another 15 percent of paper usage that is around 45 lakh pages annually, they said.

The legal size paper (35.56 cm x 21.59 cm) is roughly 23 per cent bigger in size, than A4 size paper (29.7 x 21 cm), however due to margin reduction and one and half line spacing for the same paper area around 15 per cent more content can be accommodated, thus saving equivalent amount of paper.

Earlier, this year, the top court administration also permitted Advocate(s)-on-Record and Parties-in-person to file 1+1 paper books instead of 1+3 paper books at the time of initial filing, which is projected to save another 15 lakh A4 sheets of paper annually.

The top court registry has also decided to dispense with the printing and distribution of hard copies of Judgments and Orders, to various agencies as the same are now being made available on the Supreme Court official website.

Sources said that based on the usage of the last three calendar years, around 8.5 lakh pages would be saved annually by this initiative.

They said that it has been further decided that all communications from the Registry shall only be sent to the concerned Advocate(s)-on-Record through e-mail followed by an SMS on their registered mobile number.

The Supreme Court has also decided that in all the administrative work of the Registry usage of A4 sheet with both the sides printing is mandatory and in the internal deliberations amongst various sections of the Registry, communication through e-mail/ electronic mode has been encouraged.

The top court administration officials said that around 25 lakh pages are likely to be saved annually by this initiative.

They said that as per the average consumption for 2017-2019 for various administrative works an estimated 20,000 reams annually were utilised by the Registry and assuming at least 25 per cent saving due to double side printing and reduction of size of paper around 25 lakh sheets are likely to be saved.

Sources pointed out that due to these innovative steps by the top court for reducing usage of paper are likely to save around 2.4 crore sheets of paper, reducing felling of over two thousand eight hundred trees annually and conserve over one crore litres of water every year.

As per generic estimate one tree makes 16.67 reams of paper (8,333 sheets) and around 500 ml water is required for one sheet.