Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Why India’s court digitisation keeps failing

India's judicial digitisation has created portals and platforms without changing how court records are created, managed or shared.

Last week, I wrote about the daily misery of using an Indian court website: unreachable when you need it and unreliable when you reach it. It is tempting to conclude that maybe courts just need better designers and web developers. After all, they could hire the best in the country tomorrow and rebuild every website within a month. But that won’t change anything.

A court website is an access layer to an underlying data set that compiles case events — filings, listings, orders, and adjournments — that must be updated regularly with every case. Think of it as a window that lets you peek into a house. Painting the window or changing the interiors will only change how things look. It won’t fix the shaky foundation the house was built on.

Computerising the courtrooms

The eCourts project is nearly two decades old. It began in 2007 after the Supreme Court’s e-Committee prepared an action plan in 2005. That original plan was almost entirely about infrastructure. How to get courtroom computers, laptops, operating systems, Wi-Fi and training. There was little to no focus on data management — how a case should be identified, what forms part of its process record, how the provenance or the history of an entry is established, or who is responsible for maintaining its integrity.

The National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) arrived in 2013, and with it came an attempt to standardise some of the reporting. It worked partially. Because of differences in practice and terminology, and sometimes laws, every state and district used its own nomenclature for case types. District courts recorded over 800 case types, which the NJDG sqeezed into around 30. Local difference is not by itself a problem. No one can or should force Kerala and Kashmir to speak the same language. But in the absence of translators and because no one has done the work of mapping these differences into a common structure, the reporting does not permit useful........

© ThePrint