bhopal the supreme court monitoring committee looking into medical rehabilitation of bhopal gas victims has said that the directive regarding computerisation of medical records of the gas victims at gas relief hospitals of the state government and the bmhrc has only been partially complied with the records have been computerised but not digitised said the committeethe committees report complies to the apex court order passed on august 9 2012 on a pil seeking better medical care of bhopal gas victimsreferring to the response of the state government on the issue of computerisation of medical records of gas victims the committee said the computerisation of six gas relief hospitals was completed in the said duration an amount of rs 114 crore has been spent by the state government for computerization of hospitals till 2014 it is also stated that rs 39 crore has been spent by the state government from 201516 to 202223 for operating the computerisation work the state government has made a budget provision of rs 650 crore for the financial year 202324 for the samethe compliance report of the task has been submitted to the court by technical director nic bhopal the complete record of treatment of gas victim patients who visited the hospital run by the state are readily available to treating doctors they can see the history of the patient at a glance interlinking of computer systems of bmhrc and gas relief hospitals has been doneehospital project in the gas relief hospitals is running on old client serverbased technology and the nic officials have suggested moving to cloud based technology however nic through its state information officer in its reply stated that though computerisation has been undertaken by nic but digitisation of medical records was not undertaken as it was never handed over to the nic in the above reference initially a distinction was sought to be drawn between computerisation and digitisationhowever the plea making distinction between computerisation and digitisation was rejected by the high court by order dated february 20 2023the hc observed this court outrightly rejects the aforesaid contention since in the considered opinion of this court the expression computerisation includes within its ambit the concept of digitisation of records as such the functionaries of the state were also equally responsible to ensure completion of computerisation including digitization of records of bmhrc and other hospitalsit would therefore be clear that computerisation included digitisation however as per response of the nic itself it did not undertake digitisation of medical records as it was not covered within the project entrusted to it by the state governmentthe monitoring committee report further said it is also noted with regards to computerisation that treating doctors in gas relief hospitals have to be assisted by a computer operator to feed the patients treatment information therefore it appears that the benefit of computerisation is not easily available to doctors it also appears that the state government has to undertake heavy expenditure for operating the computerization to provide computer operator to each