E-Courts in India: Phases, Platforms and the Road to Paperless Justice

India's courts are among the busiest in the world, and for most of their history they ran on paper: paper files, paper cause lists, paper summons. The e-Courts Mission Mode Project is the judiciary's twenty-year project to change that. Launched in 2007 as part of the National e-Governance Plan and implemented jointly by the e-Committee of the Supreme Court and the Department of Justice, it has computerised nearly every district and subordinate court in the country, put live case data online for citizens, and is now, in its third phase, pushing toward digital and paperless courts with an outlay of Rs 7,210 crore. This article explains the three phases, the platforms, the benefits, and the challenges that remain.

What the e-Courts project is

The e-Courts project is a Mission Mode Project, which is the National e-Governance Plan's term for a flagship, time-bound national programme, for the ICT enablement of district and subordinate courts. Its stated objective is improving access to justice through technology: faster disposal of cases by speeding up court processes, and a transparent online flow of information on case status, orders and judgments to judges, litigants, lawyers and other stakeholders. It is implemented on the basis of the National Policy and Action Plan for Implementation of Information and Communication Technology in the Indian Judiciary, drawn up by the e-Committee, a body of the Supreme Court that sets the technology vision for the judiciary, in partnership with the Department of Justice, which funds and administers the scheme. Note the jurisdiction: the project covers the district and subordinate judiciary, not the Supreme Court and High Courts, which pursue their own digitisation programmes.

Three instruments carry the project's daily work. The Case Information System (CIS) is the free and open-source case-management software, customised for Indian courts, on which district and subordinate courts record filings, hearings and orders; its data is what flows upward into national dashboards. The National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) is the online repository built from CIS data, using elastic search technology, through which anyone can look up case status information, orders and judgments of the district and subordinate courts. And the citizen is reached through seven service-delivery channels: SMS push and pull, email, the multilingual e-Courts services portal, Judicial Service Centres, information kiosks, the e-Courts mobile app, and the JustIS app for judges.

Phase I (2011-2015): putting computers in courts

The first phase was about foundations. Implemented during 2011-2015, Phase I aimed at basic computerisation of courts and local network connectivity. It computerised 14,249 court sites, installed local area networks in 13,683 courts, enabled software for digital case management in 13,672 courts, and provided video-conferencing facilities in 493 courts and 347 jails. The total expenditure was about Rs 640 crore. At the end of Phase I, the judiciary had hardware, networks and the first version of CIS, but the citizen-facing services that define the project today did not yet exist. The phase's own official description is telling: basic computerisation and internal connectivity. The court could manage its files digitally; the litigant still had to come to the court to learn anything.

Phase II (2015-2023): the citizen-centric turn

Phase II, running from 2015 to 2023 with an outlay of Rs 1,670 crore, shifted the emphasis from the court's convenience to the citizen's. The number of computerised courts rose to 18,735 district and subordinate courts, and 99.5 per cent of court complexes were connected through wide area network links. Video-conferencing capacity exploded: facilities were provided to 3,240 court complexes and 1,272 jails, with additional VC cabins and licences sanctioned, a build-out that proved decisive when the Covid-19 pandemic forced courts to function remotely. This phase also created the platforms citizens now use daily.

Five Phase II creations deserve individual attention because each is a favourite Prelims target. The National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) became the data repository of orders, judgments and case details of the district and subordinate courts, accessible as an online platform, with tens of crores of cases and orders searchable by lawyers and litigants. E-filing and e-payments let lawyers and litigants file cases and pay court fees online, reducing the queue at the filing counter. Video-conferencing normalised remote hearings, including the production of undertrials from jails. The e-Courts mobile app for lawyers and litigants, with over 2.8 crore downloads, and the JustIS app for judges put case information in pockets. And e-Sewa Kendras, one-stop facilitation centres inside court complexes, were established so that litigants without smartphones, broadband or digital literacy could still file cases, check status and use e-services with human help. Alongside these, free legal-aid institutions, the District Legal Services Authorities and Taluka Legal Services Committees, were computerised too, extending the digital reach to the poorest litigants.

Phase III (2023-2027): toward digital and paperless courts

On 13 September 2023 the Union Cabinet approved Phase III of the e-Courts project for the period 2023-2027, with a budgetary outlay of Rs 7,210 crore, over four times the funding for Phase II, spread over four years. The ambition is a regime change: from courts that use computers to digital, online and paperless courts, moving court proceedings into a fully digital format and creating a unified technology platform for the judiciary with a seamless, paperless interface between courts, litigants and other stakeholders.

The approved components read like a checklist of the project's next decade. Digital and paperless courts aim to bring court proceedings themselves under a digital format, with digitisation of the entire court record including legacy records; official releases report over 660 crore pages of records digitised so far. E-Sewa Kendras are to be saturated across all court complexes, about 4,400 of them, universalising e-filing and e-payments so that no litigant is shut out by lack of digital access. Video-conferencing is to expand beyond courts and jails to hospitals, for instance for recording the evidence of witnesses who cannot travel. Online courts are to grow beyond the adjudication of traffic violations into other categories of petty offences. A state-of-the-art cloud-based data repository is to store and retrieve digitised records securely. And emerging technologies including artificial intelligence and its subsets such as optical character recognition are to be used for analysing case pendency, forecasting future litigation, live streaming of proceedings, and handling electronic evidence, alongside intelligent smart systems for data-based decision-making by judges and registries in scheduling and prioritising cases.

The citizen's toolkit: how a litigant experiences e-courts

For the ordinary litigant, e-courts are not a project document but a set of touchpoints. The NJDG lets anyone track a case's status and read its orders without visiting the court, which is a quiet revolution in a system where information once travelled through lawyers' clerks and court touts. Virtual courts take this further into actual adjudication: about 30 virtual courts now dispose of traffic challans entirely online, and official figures report over 10 crore challans received, over 9 crore disposed, and nearly Rs 1,000 crore in fines collected through them, showing that high-volume, low-discretion matters can be cleared without a physical courtroom. E-filing and online fee payment save the litigant repeated trips, while SMS and email alerts push the next hearing date to the litigant's phone instead of requiring a visit to the notice board. And where the litigant cannot use any of this, the e-Sewa Kendra in the court complex provides staffed assistance, the project's answer to the digital divide.

Behind the citizen's screen sits the case-management spine. CIS version 4.0 software is now implemented across district and taluka courts, standardising how cases are registered, listed and decided, which is what makes national data possible at all. The JustIS app gives judges mobile access to their cause lists and case data. Together these tools mean that a case is no longer a file in a rack that only the court's staff can find; it is a record in a system that the litigant, the lawyer, the judge and the policy-maker can all see, each with appropriate access.

The intelligence layer: ICJS, SUVAS and SUPACE

Three systems add intelligence on top of digitisation, and each illustrates a different promise of legal technology. The Inter-operable Criminal Justice System (ICJS) digitally links the pillars of the criminal justice system: courts, police, prosecution, prisons and forensics, so that a charge sheet filed by the police, the forensic report on the evidence, and the prison's custody record can flow into the court's record without being retyped and lost at each handoff, enabling quicker, evidence-backed decision-making. It addresses one of the oldest frictions in Indian criminal justice: institutions that share cases but not data.

The second promise is language. SUVAS, the Supreme Court Vidhik Anuvaad Software, is an AI-driven translation tool that converts Supreme Court judgments and orders from English into Indian languages, and the translated judgments are hosted on the e-SCR portal, the free electronic Supreme Court Reports service, vastly expanding public access. Tens of thousands of judgments have been translated so far, with mandatory human review by dedicated AI translation committees, because in a country where most litigants do not read English, a judgment available only in English is a judgment half-delivered. The official line is that AI in the justice system remains human-supervised, ethically guided and privacy-conscious, a formulation worth remembering for mains answers.

The third promise is research. SUPACE, the Supreme Court Portal for Assistance in Courts' Efficiency, uses natural language processing to analyse case facts, identify precedents and produce research summaries for judges, while separate modules handle file search and evidence extraction. What it does not do is decide: no module substitutes for the judge. Companion tools extend the same logic downward: registries use AI and optical character recognition to flag defects in e-filings at the scrutiny stage, and speech-to-text tools transcribe depositions in trial courts. The design principle across all of these is assistance, not automation of adjudication.

What e-courts deliver: access, transparency, pendency tracking

The benefits sort themselves into three. Access improves because distance and queues matter less: a litigant in a remote district can check case status on a phone, a lawyer can appear by video link, and e-Sewa Kendras catch those whom the phone leaves behind. Transparency improves because data that was once locked in court registers is now searchable on the NJDG, which disciplines delay: when pendency is visible court-wise and judge-wise, it can be managed. And pendency tracking improves because the system finally measures what it must fix; the NJDG is the single source from which the government quotes pendency figures in Parliament and from which reformers identify the courts where arrears concentrate. During the Covid-19 pandemic, when physical courtrooms shut, the video-conferencing backbone built in Phase II kept the system functioning, with courts holding crores of virtual hearings, a stress test the project passed.

The link to judicial pendency needs careful framing for mains. Over 5.6 crore cases are pending across the Supreme Court, the 25 High Courts and the district courts, with roughly 5 crore of them in the district courts that e-courts covers, a number that has grown steadily even as digitisation advanced. Technology attacks the administrative component of delay: lost files, unserved summons, adjournments caused by missing records, and the sheer opacity of listing. It cannot by itself add judges, simplify procedure, or reduce the inflow of litigation, and the Supreme Court itself has observed that tackling pendency must become a collaborative mission of the Bench and the Bar. E-courts are therefore best described as a necessary enabler of pendency reduction, not a silver bullet for it.

What holds e-courts back: four challenges

First, the digital divide. India has deep gaps in smartphone ownership, broadband quality and digital literacy between urban and rural areas, between men and women, and between the affluent and the poor. A digital court that the poorest litigant cannot enter is a new kind of wall, not an open door. E-Sewa Kendras are the designated bridge, but their saturation, staffing and service quality are still being built out under Phase III.

Second, cybersecurity and data protection. Centralising crores of case records, with personal details of litigants, witnesses and accused persons, in cloud repositories creates an attractive target and a serious privacy responsibility. Court records contain some of the most sensitive personal data the state holds, and the system must guard them against breach, manipulation and unauthorised access while remaining open enough to serve transparency. The balance between open justice and data protection is still being worked out.

Third, capacity: of judges, court staff and lawyers. Software does not run itself; court staff must enter data accurately and on time, judges must manage digital workflows, and lawyers, particularly older practitioners in district courts, must adapt to e-filing and virtual hearings. Hundreds of training and awareness programmes have covered lakhs of stakeholders, but the project's own documents acknowledge that change management is a continuing task, and resistance from the Bar has been a real political fact in the digitisation story.

Fourth, district-court infrastructure. The last mile is a taluka court with erratic power supply, patchy connectivity and ageing hardware. Phase III provides for IT hardware for existing and newly set-up courts and even solar power backup, an admission that the digital judiciary rests on a physical foundation that is uneven across the country. Until that foundation is level, the benefits of e-courts will remain unevenly distributed, which is itself an access-to-justice question.

The infrastructure question: the proposed NJIAI

Digital courts still sit inside physical buildings, and the buildings are the weaker half of the story. The Chief Justice of India has proposed a National Judicial Infrastructure Authority of India (NJIAI) to plan and execute court infrastructure as a dedicated national mission.

Judicial infrastructure means more than courtrooms: the physical premises of courts and tribunals, lawyers' chambers, and the digital and human-resources backbone without which timely justice stalls. An efficient infrastructure, in this conception, is a barrier-free and citizen-friendly environment giving equal and free access to justice.

The structural problem is ownership. Building infrastructure for the subordinate judiciary rests with state governments, with project design and execution largely the prerogative of public works departments and financing split across departments that do not coordinate. In the absence of a dedicated body, nobody fully owns the outcome, which is the case for the proposed authority.

Prelims hooks

• Match the phases: Phase I (2011-2015) computerised 14,249 courts; Phase II (2015-2023) computerised 18,735 courts with Rs 1,670 crore; Phase III (2023-2027) has an outlay of Rs 7,210 crore, approved by the Union Cabinet in September 2023.
• The project runs since 2007 under the National e-Governance Plan, implemented by the e-Committee of the Supreme Court with the Department of Justice, and covers district and subordinate courts.
• The NJDG is the online repository of case status, orders and judgments of the district and subordinate courts, built from CIS data.
• About 30 virtual courts adjudicate traffic challans online, with over 9 crore challans disposed and nearly Rs 1,000 crore in fines collected.
• The ICJS links courts, police, prosecution, prisons and forensics; SUVAS is the AI tool translating Supreme Court judgments into Indian languages, hosted on the e-SCR portal; SUPACE assists judges with legal research without deciding cases.
• The e-Courts mobile app has over 2.8 crore downloads; e-Sewa Kendras are staffed facilitation centres in court complexes for litigants without digital access.
• Over 5.6 crore cases are pending across Indian courts, roughly 5 crore of them in district courts: the backdrop against which e-courts' pendency-tracking role is judged.

Key Terms

• NJIAI: The proposed National Judicial Infrastructure Authority of India, a dedicated national body for planning and executing court infrastructure.
• Inter-operable Criminal Justice System (ICJS): The system digitally linking the pillars of criminal justice, courts, police, prosecution, prisons and forensics, so that charge sheets, forensic reports and custody records flow into the court's record electronically, enabling quicker, evidence-backed decisions.
• National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG): The online repository, built with elastic search technology under the e-Courts project, of case status information, orders and judgments of the district and subordinate courts, through which lawyers, litigants and researchers can search tens of crores of cases and orders.
• E-Committee of the Supreme Court: The Supreme Court's technology body that formulates the National Policy and Action Plan for ICT in the judiciary and guides the e-Courts project; funds are released to High Courts on its recommendation.
• Case Information System (CIS): The free and open-source case-management software customised for Indian district and subordinate courts, on which filings, hearings and orders are recorded; its data feeds the National Judicial Data Grid. Version 4.0 is implemented across district and taluka courts.
• E-Courts Mission Mode Project: The national e-governance programme, running since 2007, for ICT enablement of district and subordinate courts. Implemented by the e-Committee of the Supreme Court with the Department of Justice, it has run in three phases: basic computerisation (2011-2015), citizen-centric services (2015-2023), and digital and paperless courts (2023-2027).
• National e-Governance Plan: The Government of India's framework, launched in 2006, for delivering government services electronically; the e-Courts project is one of its Mission Mode Projects, meaning a flagship, time-bound national programme.
• Judicial pendency: The backlog of undecided cases in courts, over 5.6 crore across Indian courts with roughly 5 crore in district courts; caused by judge vacancies, procedural complexity, rising litigation and administrative friction, and tracked nationally through the NJDG.
• Paperless court: A court in which proceedings, filings, records and orders exist in digital form rather than on paper; the declared goal of e-Courts Phase III, to be achieved through digitisation of legacy records, digital workflows, cloud storage and electronic evidence.
• Digital divide: The gap between those with and without access to digital devices, connectivity and digital literacy; in the justice context, the risk that digitised courts exclude poor, rural and less literate litigants, which e-Sewa Kendras are meant to bridge.
• E-Sewa Kendra: A staffed one-stop facilitation centre inside a court complex where litigants, especially those without smartphones, broadband or digital literacy, can file cases online, check case status and use e-court services with human assistance; Phase III aims to saturate all court complexes.
• Virtual court: A court that adjudicates cases entirely online without the physical presence of parties. About 30 virtual courts in India dispose of traffic challans online; Phase III plans to extend online adjudication beyond traffic violations to other petty offences.

Practice questions

1. Consider the following statements about the e-Courts project: 1. It is implemented by the e-Committee of the Supreme Court with the Department of Justice. 2. It covers the Supreme Court and the High Courts along with district courts. 3. Phase III was approved in September 2023 with an outlay of Rs 7,210 crore. Which of the statements given above is/are correct? (a) 1 and 3 only (b) 2 and 3 only (c) 1 and 2 only (d) 1, 2 and 3
2. The National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG): (a) is a repository of case status, orders and judgments of district and subordinate courts. (b) adjudicates traffic challans online. (c) translates Supreme Court judgments into Indian languages. (d) links police, prosecution, prisons and forensics digitally.
3. With reference to e-Courts Phase II (2015-2023), which of the following is correct? (a) It computerised 14,249 courts at an expenditure of Rs 640 crore. (b) It achieved 99.5 per cent WAN connectivity of court complexes and created the NJDG. (c) It was approved with an outlay of Rs 7,210 crore. (d) It introduced paperless courts across all districts.
4. Consider the following pairs: 1. SUVAS : AI translation of Supreme Court judgments into Indian languages. 2. ICJS : inter-operable criminal justice system linking courts, police, prosecution, prisons and forensics. 3. SUPACE : online adjudication of traffic challans. Which of the pairs given above is/are correctly matched? (a) 1 and 2 only (b) 2 and 3 only (c) 1 and 3 only (d) 1, 2 and 3
5. E-Sewa Kendras under the e-Courts project are: (a) virtual courts that decide cases online. (b) staffed facilitation centres in court complexes helping litigants use e-services. (c) mobile apps for judges to manage cause lists. (d) data centres hosting the NJDG.