The Union Law minister Kiren Rijiju, in a written reply to a member’s query in the Rajya Sabha recently said that the government has launched the eCourts Integrated Mission Mode Project in the country for computerization of district & subordinate courts with the objective of improving access to justice using technology.
Further, he stated as part of the National e-Governance Plan that the project has been under implementation since 2007 for ICT development of the Indian Judiciary based on the “National Policy and Action Plan for Implementation of Information and Communication Technology in the Indian Judiciary”.
The Union minister said that the “eCourts project is being implemented in association with the e-Committee Supreme Court of India and Department of Justice. Phase I of the project was implemented during 2011-2015. Phase II of the project started in 2015 under which 18,735 District and Subordinate courts have been computerized so far.”
Rijiju said phase II of the project is nearing its completion and the Detailed Project Report (DPR) for e-Courts Phase III has been finalized and approved by the committee that was put together by the Supreme Court on October 21, 2022.
The statement further informed that the meeting of the Expenditure Finance Committee (EFC) Meeting was held on February 23, 2023. The requisite approvals of eCourts Project Phase-III are at an advanced stage.
The minister said in his written reply that “Phase III of the project envisions the facilitation of various new features, a few of which are the digital initiatives that encompass Digital and Paperless Courts that aim to bring court proceedings under a digital format in a court; Online Court that focus on eliminating the presence of litigants or lawyers in the court through exploration and adoption of different forms of digitally enabled hearings; expansion of the scope of Virtual Courts beyond adjudication of Traffic Violations; use of emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence and its subsets like Optical Character Recognition (OCR) etc for analysis of case pendency, forecasting future litigation, etc.”
