The Supreme Court onboarded its case data on the National Judicial Data Grid.
Key Points
- The National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) portal is a national repository of data relating to cases instituted, pending and disposed of by the courts across the country.
- The integration with NJDG as part of an ‘Open Data Policy (ODP)’ to provide transparent case information to the public.
- ODP is increasingly a set of policies – that promotes transparency, accountability, and value creation by making government data available to all.
- 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.
What Is The National Judicial Data Grid?
- NJDG is a database of orders, judgments and case details of 18,735 District and subordinate Courts and High Courts
- Its key feature is that the data is updated in real-time and has granular data up to the Taluka level.
- All High Courts have also joined the NJDG through web services, providing easy access facility to the litigant public.
- The NJDG was built as part of Phase II of the e-Courts project, which is a Centrally Sponsored Scheme.
- The platform has been developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in close coordination with the in-house software development team of the Computer Cell, Registry of the Supreme Court with an interactive interface and analytics dashboard.
- Currently, litigants can access case status information of 23.81 crore cases and more than 23.02 crore orders/judgments.
Key Features of the NJDG
- NJDG provides the consolidated figures of pendency of cases in Judiciary.
- Statistical data is automatically updated daily.
- Pending Civil and Criminal Cases segregated into varied categories.
- Information pertaining to Institution and Disposal of cases is shown.
- Serves as National Judicial Data Warehouse.
How Does NJDG Help?
- NJDG works as a monitoring tool to identify, manage & reduce pendency of cases.
- It helps to provide timely inputs for making policy decisions to reduce delays in disposing of cases and helps in reducing case pendency.
- It also helps identify specific bottlenecks in judicial processes.
- It also helps generate inputs related to particular areas of law. For example, to track cases related to land disputes, Land Records data of 26 States have been linked with NJDG.
Current Pendency Status of Cases
- For the year 2023, the total pendency of registered cases in SC is 64,854.
- In SC, there are 5,412 cases filed and 5033 cases disposed in August 2023.
- There are 583 three-judge Bench matters, 288 five-judge Bench cases, 21 seven-judge Bench cases, and 135 nine-judge Bench cases, all of which are civil, pending in the Supreme Court.
E-Court Integrated Mission Mode Project
- The E-Courts Project was conceptualised on the basis of “National Policy and Action Plan for Implementation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the Indian Judiciary – 2005” submitted by e-Committee of the Supreme Court of India (set up in 2004).
- The main objectives of the e-Court Project are as follows:
- To provide efficient & time-bound citizen centric service delivery.
- To develop, install & implement decision support systems in courts.
- To automate the processes to provide transparency of Information access to its stakeholders.
- To enhance judicial productivity both qualitatively & quantitatively, to make the justice delivery system affordable, accessible, cost effective & transparent.
- The e-Courts National portal (gov.in) was launched in 2013. This provides Case Status, daily Case-list, Cases Filed and Cases Registered through the Case information System (CIS) Software.
Initiatives Taken Under the E-Courts Project
- Improvisation of Network: Under the Wide Area Network (WAN) Project, connectivity has been provided to 99.4% of total Court Complexes across India with an improved bandwidth speed.
- Open-Source Software: Case Information Software (CIS) is based on Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) which has been developed by National Informatics Centre (NIC).
- NJDG Database: National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) is a database of orders, judgments, and cases, created as an online platform under the eCourts Project.
- Access to Case Status Information: Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have been introduced in 2020 to allow Central and State Governments and institutional litigants including local bodies to access NJDG data to improve pendency monitoring and compliance.
- Virtual Courts: 21 Virtual Courts in 17 States/UTs have been operationalized to handle traffic challan cases.
- Video-Conferencing (VC): Video-conferencing (VC) facilities have also been enabled between court complexes and corresponding jails.
- E-filing: New e-filing system has been rolled out for the electronic filing of legal papers with upgraded features. As of 2022, a total of 19 High Courts have adopted the model rules of e-Filing.
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