Blitz Bureau
INDIA has emerged as a global leader in conducting court hearing through Video Conferencing. The District & Subordinate courts heard 2,48,21,789 cases while the High Courts heard 90,21,629 cases till October 31, 2024 using video conferencing system. The Supreme Court of India held 7,54,443 hearings from March 23, 2020 to June 4, 2024 through video conferencing.
Live Streaming of court proceedings has been started in the High Courts of Gujarat, Gauhati, Orissa, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Patna, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Calcutta and the Supreme Court of India, thus allowing media and other interested persons to join the proceedings.
Virtual Courts in 21 states/UTs have been operationalised to handle traffic challan cases. Over six crore cases have been handled by these virtual courts and in more than 62 lakhs cases, online fine of more than Rs 649.81 crore has been realised till October 2024.
E-filing system (version 3.0) has been rolled out with upgraded features for lawyers to access and upload documents related to the cases from any location 24X7. The system requires the option for electronic payment of fees which includes court fees, fines and penalties which are directly payable to the Consolidated Fund.
To bridge the digital divide, 1394 eSewa Kendras (facilitation centres) in District Courts and 36 eSewa Kendras in High Courts have been rolled out to provide citizen-centric services to lawyers and litigants. It also assists the litigants in accessing online e-Courts services and acts as a saviour for those who cannot afford the technology or are located in far-flung areas. It also aids to addresses the challenges caused by illiteracy among citizens at large. The National Service and Tracking of Electronic Processes (NSTEP) has been launched for technology-enabled process serving and issuing of summons. It has currently been implemented in 28 states/ UTs.
Game-changing phase
E-Courts Phase III (2023-2027) was approved by the Union Cabinet in September 2023 at an outlay of Rs 7,210 crore, which is over four times the funding for Phase-II. The project envisages various new digital initiatives such as establishment of digital and paperless courts that aim to bring court proceedings under a digital format, digitisation of court records, expansion of video conferencing facilities to courts, jails and hospitals, scope of online courts beyond adjudication of traffic violations, saturation of all court complexes with eSewa kendras, state-of-the-art and latest Cloudbased data repository for easy retrieval and supporting the digitised court records, software applications, live streaming, and electronic evidence etc., use of emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence and its subsets like Optical Character Recognition (OCR) etc.
for analysis of case pendency and forecasting future litigation, etc. Thus, the efforts of the Government of integrating technology with the governance may prove to be a game-changer in e-Courts Phase-III, ensuring ease-of-justice by making the court experience convenient, inexpensive and hassle-free to all the citizens of the country.
