Delhi HC refers PIL to ‘save paper’ to its rules committee

It referred the matter to the appropriate rule-making committee of the HC, and asked it to take a decision in accordance with law within eight weeks.

The direction by the court came on a plea by Centre for Accountability and Systemic Change (CASC), which, through its advocate Virag Gupta, claimed that printing on both sides of the paper would result in saving more trees and water, which are used in manufacturing paper.

The plea claimed that Delhi alone was responsible for 8,300 metric tonnes of waste paper every day, and only 27 per cent of it was recycled. It is alleged that approximately 10 litres of water was required to create one piece of paper.

“One generic estimate to use for the conversion is 8333.3 sheets of virgin paper per tree…” the plea added.

It said: “On a national scale, 1,39,14,226 and 1,13,012 new cases have been filed in the subordinate courts and High Courts alone. Considering all these cases to be of mere 50 pages, using single-sided prints, a total of 60,17,75,200 pages were used. Had double-side prints been used, it would have saved approximately 36,108 trees along with 300,88,76,000 litres of water”.

“Mandating double-side print would halve the requirement of paper, which is in line with the idea of Digital India…” the plea said.

During the hearing, advocate Gupta submitted that the High Court of Madhya Pradesh had, in 2016, amended its rules to bring in use of double-sided prints.