Digitisation Of Judiciary: Apex Court Launches Electronic Supreme Court Reports Project

The Supreme Court is set to launch the electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) Project to further the digitisation of the Indian Judiciary. Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud announced the launch of the portal on Monday (2 January).

The project will provide free digital access to more than 34,000 judgments of the Supreme Court to lawyers, law students, and the common public. These verdicts will be available on the apex court’s website, its mobile app, and on the judgment portal of the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG).

They will be presented in the manner they are reported in the official law report – ‘Supreme Court Reports’ (SCRs).

The e-SCR project will showcase replica soft copies of SCRs, which would be available in a PDF format. The entire gamut of judgments of the Supreme Court, from its inception in 1950, would now be available in the digital repository.

The Court has also worked with the National Informatics Center (NIC) to generate metadata on the large repository of files, to enable functions like free text search, search within search, case type, etc.

The Indian judiciary has long been accused of being inaccessible to the public at large. Judicial pronouncements are not easily accessible, and they are often long and unreadable. Accessing these reports earlier used to cost lakhs of rupees, and was therefore limited to a select few.

Moreover, the above initiative is only concerned with the apex court’s rulings and needs to be expanded to the lower judiciary too. Considering that this exercise only took 15 days for the court to complete, it should not be very difficult to implement the same further down the hierarchy.