Inviting the public to keep tabs on the burgeoning case pendency rates of their local courts, the Supreme Court launched the public access portal of the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) for district courts in a step towards demystification of judicial process for the ordinary citizen and what ails the justice delivery system across the country.
With this, ambitious efforts to digitise court system through the eCourts Project has reached the public, encouraging the litigants and the general public to watch the pendency graphs and, may be in the future, suggest solutions against justice delayed.
The NJDG already has information of 1.94 crore pending cases out of approximately 2.7 crore cases in district courts, except those in Madhya Pradesh and Delhi, where case data is being migrated to the national version of case information software.
The public access portal — designed under the guidance of Chief Justice of India H.L. Dattu and inaugurated by the apex court’s eCommittee chief Justice Madan B. Lokur — will disseminate for the public national, State, district and court-wise information about institution and disposal of cases on a monthly basis. It would also separately provide data and details of cases filed by senior citizens and women.
“With this, the figures of pendency of district judiciary courts across the country, in aggregate for country and States as well as individual court/judges are left open for being accessed by anyone visiting the National eCourts portal ‘ecourts.gov.in’,” a Supreme Court statement said.
The pendency statistics would be updated on a daily basis by district court complexes. The pendency would be broken into civil and criminal cases, segregated into year-wise categories of up to two years, between two to five years, between five to 10 years and more than 10 years.
The NJDG page for public access will also disseminate national and State, district and court-wise information about institution and disposal of previous month’s cases and also cases filed by senior citizens and women in the total pendency.
The public access page also has feature of monitoring alerts like all cases listed for the day across the country and the cases where no date is updated or a date more than three months later is updated.
“This initiative is in furtherance of the motto of judiciary to promote transparency and access of information for all the stakeholders of the justice delivery system,” the statement said.
The Indian judiciary comprises nearly 15,000 courts spread in approximately 2,500 court complexes throughout the country, the e-Courts Project website said. It said the efforts for computerising court processes have been on since 1990.
