# Improving the quality and accessibility of information from e-Courts - Part 1 - Introduction to e-Courts

In 2019, we wrote about the [state of data in the judicial sector in India](https://medium.com/civicdatalab/the-state-of-data-in-the-judicial-sector-9a178a143e). It marked the start of our journey to try and understand the internal workings of the law and justice ecosystem through data. What we observed in this short journey:

- There is no dearth of data in the sector
- Data accessibility is a major challenge and we need changes both within and outside the system to make our datasets more accessible
- The requirement of data and information is massive
- We have to build systems that will make it easier for citizens to interact with the datasets of law and justice
- We have to build bridges for civil society organisations and think tanks to collaborate and share information to reduce the data accessibility gap. A lot of orgs are working to solve similar problems albeit in a different geography. There are a lot of opportunities for us to learn from each other only if we can find ways to share and re-use datasets and follow open access standards for publishing information.

We have learnt a lot from our partners who trusted us, in this journey, to assist them in their endeavours and that has helped us a lot to deepen our understanding of the sector. Through a series of articles, we'll share our learnings till now and how we plan to collaborate and contibute going forward:

- First (Current) we'll summarise the e-Courts project.
- Next we'll document a few use-cases that people are working on using the data from e-Courts and the kind of challenges they face while working with the e-Courts data.
- We'll end the series by looking at the road talking about the road ahead and the what can we as citizens do to have more accessible law and justice datasets at our disposals.

We hope that this series makes your more curious to learn and contribute to this ecosystem. The sector touches our lives in more ways we can imagine and we need all levels of skills, support and involvement to make it more open, transparent and equitable.

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*e-Courts Case Information Management System* (CIS) is the gateway for accessing case records from all tiers of the Indian judcial ecosystem. The objective of the e-Courts project is to provide designated e-services to litigants, lawyers and judiciary through ICT (Information Communication Technology) of courts. e-Courts is a massive project in terms of its scale where all the individual states take responsibility of creating and mainitaining the information on the portal with the highest possible standards. The [e-Committee](https://ecommitteesci.gov.in/) is the governing body charged with overseeing the e-Courts Project.

The [e-Committee website](https://ecommitteesci.gov.in/) is a good place to understand the past, present and the future of the e-Courts project. A lot has happened since the project was launched in 2007:

- Development of the largest Free and Open Source Software [FOSS] based case information and management system in the world. Adoption of a FOSS based platform resulted in estimated savings of Rs. 340 crores (3400 million) to the country not including the recurrent costs towards license fees and maintenance
- Creation of a common Case Management and Information System “CIS National Core v3.2” software for all the district and subordinate courts of India
- Case Management and Information system “CIS National Core v1.0” implemented in all 22 High Courts of India
- Data of 3256 court complexes across the country is now available online
- Individual websites of 688 district courts established
- The National Judicial Data Grid [NJDG] contains data of 13.60 cores (1360 million) (pending and disposed) from district and taluka courts.
- Total 3.38 crores (338 million) cases (pending) and 12.49 crores (1249 million) orders and judgments of different High Courts available online
- 4.54 million Android users have downloaded the mobile app developed by the e-Committee.

The project has helped us in taking a long stride from from a country with legal datasets with limited or no accessibility to a place with almost near-real time access to the court proceedings with a hope to transform the way justice is delivered in this country, in a timely and transparent manner.

e-Courts is an umbrella term that represents the various legal and tech initiative initiated under the project. One of them is the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG). In a recent [webinar](https://youtu.be/sXAqTenz9_c), organised by NALSAR, [Dr Justice Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud](https://ecommitteesci.gov.in/whoswho/dr-justice-d-y-chandrachud-judge-supreme-court-of-india/), the chairperson of the e-commitee, [summarised](https://youtu.be/sXAqTenz9_c?t=1466) the kind of data and insights one can derive from the NJDG platform. An insight we should point here is these numbers are not reported from a static PDF report, but are available to everyone to view on a near real time basis.

Justice DY Chandrachud also pointed out the role and the immediate priorities of the e-Committee:

1. Laying down an SOP for digitisation
2. Laying down an SOP for e-filling across the country
3. Dealing with rules for livestreaming
4. Dealing with the Interoperable Criminal Justice System [ICJS]
5. Interlinking of law libraries across the country

The pandemic might have changed the priorities of the judciciary as well, but the work done in the last 10-12 years has now made it possible to accomplish these things in the least time possible. When we observe systems with greater accessibility standards, mostly from more developed countries, its easy to expect the same but one should also have context of the challenges we face which are far more diverse and larger in scale as compared to other countries.

> As informed citizens, our goal should be to make sure that the e-Courts takes us closer to the goal of **Access to Justice** for all.

Currently, we're in the second phase of the project:

- **Phase 1** of the e-Courts project made a lot of progress on building the infrastructure to ingest the pleothera of legal information from every case registered by making sure that all courts are part of this network.
- The objective in **Phase 2** is to build systems that can use this information to help us solve present day problems like case pendency, registration of cases, efficient and timely legal aid, case-law impact assessments, etc.

In this phase, a lot of other stakeholders like researchers, civil society orgs, legal tech startups have joined this journey to use this data in the best ways possible. *Moving forward, the judiciary and the ecommitee will be required to play a role which entails listening to the queries, demands, suggestions and feedbacks from this growing network of stakeholders*. Only then we'll be able to co-create a system that is functional, robust and future proof.

In Part 2 of this series, we will discuss a few use-cases that deal with the data from e-Courts and the challenges in using these datasets.

You can also write to us at [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]) if you'd like to have a detailed discusison around e-Courts or other aspects of the law and justice data ecosystem.

###### tags: `cdl` `blogs` `ecourts`