After Techgentsia winning the coveted “Innovation Challenge for Development of Video Conferencing Solution” challenge, the honorable high court of Kerala has approached Techgentsia to discuss the possibility of developing a virtual courthouse that supports the major courtroom procedures. Thus VCONSOL® Court was born.

VCONSOL® Court is a 100% made in India, role-based, custom-made virtual courthouse. It uses the MeitY’s award winning VCONSOL® VC engine based on MCU technology for a smoother video conferencing experience even at a very low internet speed. In VCONSOL® Courthouse any number of courtrooms can be created & supported.

One advantage of VCONSOL® Court is that every person only has to register to VCONSOL® Court once. After that they can use the credentials to log in to VCONSOL® Court from any compatible smartphone or computer from anywhere. This gives all the roles an added flexibility when procedures are conducted in multiple courts at the same time. There are even roles allocated to party-in-person and public to watch or take part in the procedures.

The Challenge

To develop a scalable, robust courthouse solution that provides the functionalities of an offline court house. The solution should differentiate itself from the plain vanilla video conferencing solutions and should be customizable to adopt various court procedures followed by various high courts across India.

Uniqueness of VCONSOL® Court

• Judge: Single sign in with direct access to courtrooms. Advocates: Single sign into all courtrooms in the courthouse. Automatic entry and exit based on item numbers and court lists. Can be customized based on local courtroom requirements.
• Prosecutors: Single sign in with direct access to courtrooms. Stays in the courtroom till the procedure ends.
• Court Officer/ Court master: Manages the courtroom. Have complete access to all courtroom functionalities. Manages the item lists and cases.
• Stenographers/PA/PS: Single sign in with direct access to courtrooms.
• Party -in -Person: Single sign in. Registration to be approved by COURT admin.
• Public: Can only view court proceedings after getting approval from the court master.
• Media & Newspaper: Can view court proceedings after getting approval from the court maste

Unique customized facilities

• Secret “judges chat” for judges in division bench which is only readable/available to judges
• Secret “judges’ room” for division bench
• Secret room/in-camera to manage POCSO proceedings Urgent entry to courtrooms for advocates
• Chat for advocates and court officer with inbuilt PDF, image & document viewer
• Hand raise functionality for advocates to address court officer
• Pause court functionality for emergency Mute, unmute audio & video facilities
• Live streaming facility (To court website or any other destination)

Deployment

The honorable high court of Kerala has been conducting its court proceedings since 2021 using VCONSOL® Court. The court uses 24 courtrooms that support various role based entries. The solution is hosted in Oracle cloud.

The Aftermath

Currently, high courts across the country have plans to customize and use VCONSOL® court on-premise and as SaaS.