Real-time data on the filing and disposal of cases in the Supreme Court will now be available at the fingertips of the common man, just a click of a mouse away.
Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud announced the onboarding of the Supreme Court on the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) in open court on Thursday.
The NJDG portal is a national repository of data relating to cases instituted, pending and disposed of by the courts across the length and breadth of the country.
“The onboarding of Supreme Court’s case data on the NJDG is based on the ‘open data policy’. Now, our data will be uploaded on the NJDG on a real-time and daily basis... At the click of a button, you can get information about the institution, disposal and pendency of cases type-wise, year-wise, stage-wise and quorum-wise,” Chief Justice Chandrachud explained.
Besides, onboarding on the NJDG would mean for the judiciary increased coordination, informed decision making, optimum deployment of resources and manpower, single source of data and a huge potential for high-quality research work.
The Chief Justice said the information available on the NJDG-SCI (Supreme Court of India) portal would include the current pendency of civil and criminal cases, filing and disposal of cases in the previous month, number of cases pending before three-judge, five-judge and even nine-judge Benches.
Pendency of cases
So far, 2023 has seen total pendency of 64,854 registered cases and 15,490 unregistered cases (yet to be cleared by the Registry) in the top court. The Supreme Court page on the NJDG shows that 583 three-judge Bench matters, 288 five-judge Bench cases, 21 seven-judge Bench and 135 (all of them civil) nine-judge Bench references are pending.
The cases filed in August in the Supreme Court amount to 5,412 and those disposed of last month were 5,033.
The Chief Justice said he would be forming more special three-judge Benches in the Supreme Court to clear pending cases.
A statement issued by the Supreme Court said the NJDG was developed by National Informatics Centre in close coordination with the in-house software development team of the Computer Cell, Supreme Court Registry with an interactive interface and analytics dashboard.
“With Supreme Court of India onboarding the National Judicial Data Grid portal, the flagship project of the e-courts project completes the full circle. Now we have all three tiers of Indian judiciary on the NJDG portal. The NJDG is recognised as a significant innovation under the ease of doing business initiative of the government of India,” the statement said.
Published - September 14, 2023 12:27 pm IST
