High court to get new Chandigarh building to store records

CHANDIGARH - The Punjab and Haryana High Court has run out of space to store its judicial records and will soon get a new building here to store these.

Punjab Governor and Chandigarh Administrator S.F. Rodrigues Friday laid the foundation stone of the Central Judicial Archive building for the high court in the city’s industrial area (Phase-II) here, where judicial records will be preserved.

This modern facility will be one of the first of its magnitude for any high court in the country and all modern means of information technology and best practices for record management will be introduced.

Originally set up as the Lahore High Court in pre-independence India at Lahore city (now in Pakistan) in 1919, and later christened at the Punjab High Court after India’s independence (Aug 15, 1947), the high court started functioning from its present building - designed by Chandigarh’s founder-architect Le Corbusier - in January 1955.

High court officials said the new project has been conceived to accommodate judicial records, presently housed in a large building close to the main high court building.

The design of the new complex will be modular to achieve efficiency both in terms of management and construction, they added.

The complex will have two basements and two floors above, in the first phase with future expansion of up to four floors. The basement of the complex will be accessible through a motorable ramp, to allow easy ingress and outgress of the huge quantity of records intended in such structure.