ECourts Phase III: Implementation Status In India

Policy Update
Sandra Menon

Background

The eCourts Project phase III has its genesis in the National Policy and Action Plan for Implementation of Information and Communication Technology in the Indian Judiciary, framed in 2005, and has been implemented since 2007 under the National e-Governance Plan. E-governance entails the use of Information and Communication Technology by governmental institutions in providing public services and sharing of information for better participation of citizens, while the eCourts Project utilizes e-governance concept for the courts.

It is being implemented under the auspices of the e-Committee of the Supreme Court of India, which is charged with making policy plans and providing strategic direction, while implementation is done in a decentralized manner through the respective High Courts, funded by the Department of Justice under the Ministry of Law and Justice. The technical partner for the project is the National Informatics Centre, which provides software systems such as the Case Information System that is the backbone of data capture in the courts.

Phase I of the eCourts Project was between 2011 and 2015 and consisted of basic computerisation work involving the procurement of hardware and internet connection as well as establishing the Case Information System in district and taluka courts. Phase II was between 2015 and 2023 and involved extended ICT enablement to the district and subordinate courts not covered under Phase I and rolling out the citizen-centric tools like the National Judicial Data Grid, virtual courts for traffic offences and the eCourts Services mobile app. At the end of Phase II, digital facilities had been rolled out to 18,735 courts in the country.

The third phase will consolidate all of this with the clear objective of providing a seamless paperless interface between the courts, litigants, advocates and other stakeholders. The decision of the Union Cabinet to approve Phase III of the eCourts Project as a Central Sector Scheme for the period 2023 to 2027 involving a fund outlay of Rs. 7,210 crore is an indication of a conscious change in approach from laying down the basic infrastructure in the first two phases to utilising that infrastructure for paperless data-based functioning.

Functioning of eCourts Phase III

Operation of these digital systems relies on the rule of law because the provisions of Information Technology Act, 2000 and Indian Evidence Act (as amended) regulate the genuineness and validity of electronic court documents. Any unauthorized access, tampering, or leakage of case information is punishable under these laws, with fines and imprisonment varying in terms of the seriousness of the breach.

The third phase comprises various components that are geared toward the goal of developing a more digitally-enabled judicial system. The digital/paperless courts would facilitate the complete digitization of all court records including those that existed prior to the implementation of the project, making it possible to access the history of cases electronically instead of having to visit physical registers. The e-filing and e-payment services provided in the first two phases are being scaled to allow citizens to file pleadings, make payments of court charges and fines and check on the status of their cases while at the same time establishing e-sewa kendra in each court complex to assist litigants who lack access to digital devices or the internet.

This phase also involves developing cloud storage for secure storage of judicial data, use of Artificial Intelligence/OCR tools to enable case analytics, judgment translation, and prediction of pendency patterns. There will also be an expansion of video conferencing facilities between courts and jails, hospitals and other places where the production of witnesses is required as well as expanding the scope of online courts from adjudication of traffic challans to other petty offences.

In addition to these citizen services, there will be some back-end services which include Nastep for the issuance of summons electronically as well as efforts to interoperate e-courts data with those in other criminal justice databases including the police and prison data. These aspects are summarized in Table 1 below.

Table 1: Comparison of eCourts Project Phases

Source: Compiled from Press Information Bureau and Ministry of Law and Justice, Rajya Sabha reply, December 2024.

Table 2 below shows some of the key deliverables that separate Phase III from the infrastructure-building nature of Phase I and II.

Table 2: Key Deliverables of eCourts Project Phase III

Source: Compiled from the e-Committee, Supreme Court of India, Vision and Roadmap for Phase III of the eCourts Project.

Performance of eCourts Phase III

The implementation data appears to show that the physical infrastructure built up in the initial phases of e-courts has largely been built, with the government stating that 99.5 per cent of all court complexes are connected to the Wide Area Network (WAN) through dedicated bandwidth, which forms the basis for delivery of the services in Phase III.

While the National Judicial Data Grid was developed in Phase II, it has expanded under Phase III and collects data on cases from district, subordinate and High Courts, with the Supreme Court also being boarded onto the portal in September 2023. The tool has enabled tracking of pendency and disposal numbers of cases at national, state, district and individual court levels, and has been helpful in identifying cases which required special attention by judges and registries.

In terms of disposal trends, the data collected from the National Judicial Data Grid shows that there was a large number of disposed cases by district courts, in addition to disposals in the High Courts and Supreme Court in 2024, with an improved ratio of disposed cases against pendency compared to the previous year, while pendency levels were high due to the large number of cases in the system.

Such unevenness of the results can reflect a more general trend in the development of the project to date, where tools which are used to measure and track the results of implementation, like the National Judicial Data Grid and the eCourts Services applications, have developed relatively rapidly as they leverage case management software systems which already exist in the courts, while deliverables which require new resources, like digitization of legacy documents and deployment of e-Sewa Kendras, have been moving much slower. The gap between the four times increase in the financial outlay for Phase III and on-ground digitization of legacy documents will be one of the key indicators to monitor in the coming period.

Impact of eCourts Phase III

To litigants, the most notable impact of the eCourts Project has been the decrease in the need for multiple physical appearances at the court facilities. With the eCourts Services website and app, case information, cause lists, and orders can all be accessed online, allowing parties, advocates, and even police officers to monitor the process of court proceedings without the need to physically appear at the court. Video conferencing has proved helpful for undertrial prisoners, for whose appearance in court used to require the allocation of considerable police escort resources, and litigants in remote locations, who otherwise would be facing great travel costs in attending court hearings.

e-Sewa Kendras functioning set up as part of the eCourts Project are meant to provide these advantages to those citizens who cannot afford to use the internet directly due to their socio-economic conditions, thereby narrowing down at least one aspect of the digital divide that would otherwise keep less privileged litigants out of the benefits of automation. Transparency is another aspect where the project has delivered, given that pendency and disposal data available on the National Judicial Data Grid enables litigants, academics, and policymakers to assess court efficiency in a way impossible previously, and was considered by the government as an illustration of ease-of-doing-business reform given its importance for commercial disputes settlement.

The other, internal aspect of digitization has affected the judiciary and the legal profession, making certain practical barriers that were traditionally in place for people willing to pursue a career in law easier to overcome. For example, according to one commentator on the project, the capacity to file, monitor and argue cases remotely makes it easier for women judges and advocates to manage their work in court with child-rearing responsibilities.

Emerging Issues

However, there are several issues which have been identified with the direction that Phase III will take. Legal scholars have argued that the absence of standardization in the classification of the cases by subject matter and type due to inconsistent terminologies used by different courts in the categorization of the cases makes it hard to compare or conduct research based on the information provided by the eCourts system. This problem has made the use of digitization initiative less effective in creation of a database of legal precedence, which is an area where most people opt for costly and non-accessible to most private law firms.

Another issue regarding Phase III is the digital divide in the country, since the transition to the use of the eCourts system assumes the presence of a certain level of digital skills and connectivity which is lacking in India, especially in rural areas and among female and elderly litigants who still lag behind their urban and male peers in the ownership of smartphones and internet access. Adequacy of staffing of e-Sewa Kendras, which are intended to bridge this digital divide, will determine whether they will become a reality or exist only on paper.

Finally, the issue of the speed with which the budget allocated for Phase III is being spent and the speed of the process of digitization of the archives, which are usually handwritten and damaged and stored in formats which make it hard to scan them automatically, needs to be addressed. It will also be necessary to consider issues of cybersecurity and data protection which arise with increasing use of cloud-based storage of the case information.

Way Forward

The following priorities become especially crucial for making Phase III live up to its promised philosophy of access and inclusion within the 2023-2027 period.

1. Establishing standard case classifications: The eCommittee and the Department of Justice must focus on establishing a standardized terminology and structure of data fields to classify cases and subject matters across all courts. Without that, the National Judicial Data Grid and any other database of case law will remain impractical as an instrument for research, policy analysis or searching for precedents despite increasing volumes of digitized data.

2. Operational efficiency of the e-Sewa Kendras: Facilitation centers that have been proposed to function within Phase III must be appropriately staffed and scheduled to function, along with the promotion of these centers in the court complexes that they will be serving, for the benefit of the litigants that may not have individual access to any digital facilities. The number of such court complexes with fully functional and adequately staffed e-Sewa Kendra can be measured on a quarterly basis against the target of complete saturation.

3. Developing digital literacy promotion activities: Targeted outreach to litigants in rural and semi-urban areas, conducted in collaboration with State Legal Services Authorities, will be needed to ensure that the move to online processes does not aggravate existing inequities in access to justice, especially among women and older litigants who reported lower levels of access to digital resources.

4. Fast legacy record digitization: Since legacy records are normally handwritten and/or not well-indexed, it would help greatly in this case to have an officially published, court-aware time plan for the digitization of legacy records where each quarter the percent of digitized legacy records can be measured against the target set for them.

5. Protecting cybersecurity for cloud infrastructure: With more and more case records stored in cloud-based storage, protocols for data protection, access control and breach management have to be established and publicized because of the sensitive nature of the judicial records and the personal data they contain.

6. Periodic publication of use of funds: Regular publication of periodic reports about fund disbursement on components like digitization, e-Sewa Kendras, and cloud infrastructure will help in ensuring financial accountability. The performance metric for this can be a quarterly dashboard reflecting the proportion of sanctioned Rs. 7,210 crore fund disbursement vis-à-vis physical achievements made as we move towards the target year of 2027.

References

1. DD News. (2024, December 18). eCourts Mission Mode Project enters Phase III, transforming Indian judiciary with digital solutions. https://ddnews.gov.in/en/e-courts-mission-mode-project-enters-phase-iii-transforming-indian-judiciary-with-digital-solutions/
2. e-Committee, Supreme Court of India. (n.d.-a). Brief overview of the e-Courts Project. Retrieved September 1, 2026, from https://ecommitteesci.gov.in/project/brief-overview-of-e-courts-project/
3. e-Committee, Supreme Court of India. (n.d.-b). Vision and roadmap for Phase III of the eCourts Project. Retrieved September 1, 2026, from https://ecommitteesci.gov.in/vision-document-for-phase-iii-of-ecourts-project/
4. IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute. (2026). National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG): Strengthening data-driven judicial governance under e-Courts Phase III. https://www.impriindia.com/centres/center-for-human-dignity-and-development/national-judicial-data-grid-njdg-strengthening-data-driven-judicial-governance-under-e-courts-phase-iii/
5. Internet Freedom Foundation. (2021, April 13). Digitization of Indian judiciary: Phase III. https://internetfreedom.in/digitization-of-indian-judiciary-phase-iii/
6. National Judicial Data Grid. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved September 1, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Judicial_Data_Grid
7. News on Air. (2024, December 12). eCourts Mission Mode Project advancing ICT in judiciary: Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal. https://www.newsonair.gov.in/ecourts-mission-mode-project-advancing-ict-in-judiciary-law-minister-arjun-ram-meghwal
8. Press Information Bureau. (2023, September 13). Cabinet approves eCourts Project Phase-III. Government of India. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=2085127
9. Tiwary, K. A. (n.d.). E-Courts embarking on Phase-III: Judicious move for Indian judiciary. Institute of Company Secretaries of India. https://www.icsi.edu/media/webmodules/CSJ/june/13ArticleKritikaAnandTiwary.pdf
10. Vision IAS. (2024, December 18). Union Cabinet approves Phase III of the e-Courts Mission Mode Project. https://visionias.in/current-affairs/news-today/2024-12-18/polity-and-governance/union-cabinet-approves-phase-iii-of-the-e-courts-mission-mode-project

About The Contributor

Sandra Menon is a Research and Editorial Intern at IMPRI and a first-year Master’s student in Public Policy at M.O.P. Vaishnav College for Women, Chennai. Her academic interests lie in public policy and governance.

Acknowledgement

The author extends sincere thanks to the IMPRI team for their guidance.

Reviewed by: Ayana N K & Devanandana C
Published by: Neha Kumari

Disclaimer:

All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.