Digitization of records is a very important part of the development of the ICT court system. Digitization has been proposed as part of eCourts Phase II and Rs. 752.50 million crowns were proposed for this. However, in the 14th Finance Commission, there was a 10% increase in the devolution of the tax, with the state share increasing to 42%, hence the proposed Rs. 752.50 crores for this activity was not allocated at the Expenditure Finance Committee (EFC) level and this activity was to be carried out by the State Governments instead of increased devolution.
However, as a special case for the North Eastern region, funds of Rs.13.67 crore have been released to the Gauhati High Court (Chief Court) for the digitization of records of the High Court and District Courts of Assam (Rs. 6.82 for the High Court and 6.85 Rs for District Courts) under Phase II of the eCourt Project. Since the eCourts project covers only district and subordinate courts, the Supreme Court is not part of II. phase of the eCourts project.
The National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) is an online repository of case statistics resulting from digitized case records from the High Courts and District and Subordinate Courts of the country. Provides information regarding court proceedings/decisions of computer courts in the country. Around 3000 court complexes replicate live data of filing, registration, review, objections, case status, cause list, judgments and orders in real time. Through the NJDG platform, litigants currently have access to case status information in relation to more than 20.86 million cases and more than 18.02 million orders / judgments related to these computer courts as on 04.07.2022.
Case data is available on the NJDG for both civil and criminal cases with the ability to analyze based on case age as well as state and county. The NJDG functions as a monitoring tool to identify, manage and reduce case dependency. It helps to provide timely inputs for policy decision making to reduce delay in disposal of cases and helps to reduce case dependency. To track cases related to land disputes, data from land records of 26 states has been linked with the NJDG. In accordance with the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) announced by the Government of India, an open Application Programming Interface (API) has been provided to the Central and State Governments to enable easy access to NJDG data through ID and Access Department. key. Reasons for delay have recently been included in the NJDG.
According to information available on the Supreme Court website, judgment records can be searched online with the following parameters – case number, journal number, date of judgment, judge name, parties, legality, const. Bench and free text.
To make digitized records available online, the Ministry of Justice has undertaken the following initiatives under Phase II of the eCourts project:
•18735 District and subordinate courts so far computerized within II. phase of electronic courts.
•Case Information Software (CIS), which forms the basis for eCourt developed by NIC for free and open software (FOSS).
•NJDG developed with elastic search technology enabling access to 20.86 Cr cases and over 18.02 cr orders and judgments. Added delay reasons and introduced open APIs.
Citizen-oriented services provided through 7 platforms, viz. SMS push & pull, e-mail, eCourts service portal, Court Service Centers, Info kiosks, eCourts mobile application (total 79.65 million downloads by April 30, 2022) and JustIS app for judges (17,369 downloads by July 4, 2022 ).eFiling system version 3.0 introduced with advanced features like
•e-Vakalatnama, e-signature, video recording of oath etc. Integrated with e Payments module.
•The judgment retrieval portal was launched to provide free certified copies of judgments.This information was given today by the Minister for Law and Justice Shri KirenRijiju in a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha.
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