How Indian Laws and Judiciary can become More User-friendly through E-Courts

The Indian judiciary is supported by a network of courts that are located across its states. This comprises of nearly 15, 000 courts spread throughout the country. The concept of E-courts was proposed to overcome many legal and judicial problems of India. The project aims for establishing hardware, software and networking technologies to regulate day to day functioning of courts. Are you wondering what this means? Simply put, the significant functions of a court, such as filing and registration of cases, case work flow, orders and judgments will be done with the help of information technologies. The status of a case, orders, judgments, verdicts will be available 24 hours on the web, which will be accessible easily to advocates and general public.

E-courts: Highlights of the Proposed Project

The project was passed in the year 2007. The total budget is nearly Rs.442 crore. The project proposes for several IT enabled up gradation of courts, such as:

• Installation of laptops and laser printers.
• Personalized training to legal officials.
• Broad band based internet connectivity to judges.
• Facilities like videoconferencing, site preparation, hardware networking and technical manpower.

E-courts: Project in India Seems to Have Failed

India lacks the proper infrastructure and expertise that is required to implement such an ambitious project. Till now, not a single E-court has been established in India. The project monitoring system i.e. the National Informatics Centre (NIC) committee has become obsolete and inactive. The chances of extending the monitoring committee are very rare.

The project is said to be launched without prior proper estimation of costs and feasibility analysis. The e-court project has failed in all respect after wasting so much time and crores of public money.