In a bid to improve access to justice through digitisation, the government is planning to bring online connectivity to 2,992 more lower and district courts across the country. A report in Hindustan Times which cited data released by the Law Ministry said that the government aims to bring online connectivity in these courts by year-end. It said that of the 2,992 courts, 547 court complexes, mainly lower courts, still have no digital connectivity.
The move to bring online connectivity in the courts is a part of the Supreme Court-monitored eCourts Mission Mode Project which seeks to make the whole judicial system information and communication technology enabled by putting in place modern equipment. Under the phase-II of the programme, the report said that state-run BSNL will connect subordinate courts with wide area network (WAN) connectivity with a total outlay of Rs 167 crore. The total outlay of the second phase has been fixed at Rs 1670 crore which began in 2015 and will end in 2019.
Once the works are over, litigants can track their case status, daily orders, judgments online and other details of their interest as well. The major objectives of the project include Electronic movement of data from taluka/trial to appeal courts; installation of video conferencing facility; connecting all courts to the national Judicial Data Grid (MJDG) through WAN and citizen-centric facilities.
“The next step should be to enable complete online disposal of cases where the penalty is limited to monetary value, such as challan matters and municipal tax cases. This will considerably ease burden of the common man,” the HT report quoted Mayank Tiwari, assistant professor of the National Law University, Cuttack, as saying.
According to data obtained from the justice department, the phase-I of the ‘e-courts’ project that was implemented between 2011 and 2015, saw 14,249 lower and district courts being made ready for computerisation.
The report said that e-filing and online payment of court fees is now enabled in Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Also, over 14,000 judicial officers were given training on the use of an “UBUNTU-Linux Operating System” and more than 4,000 court personnel were trained in the case information system (CIS). Video-conferencing facilities between 488 court complexes and 342 corresponding jails were also installed, the HT report added.
Once the digitisation process is over, it will bring down the manual work that is one of the reasons for high judicial pendency. Recently, President Ram Nath Kovind had said that the ‘culture of seeking adjournments is among the other reasons for judicial delays and expressed confidence that the legal fraternity will resolve not to seek adjournments except in absolutely unavoidable circumstances’. According to him, there is a backlog of 3.3 crore cases in different courts of the country. Of these, while 2.84 crore cases are pending in the subordinate courts,43 lakh and around 58,000 cases are pending in the High Courts and the Supreme Court, respectively.
