Chief Justice of India (CJI) D Y Chandrachud Monday announced the launch of the electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) project to provide free access to judgements to lawyers, law students and the common public.
CJI Chandrachud said that the present developing facilities of digitalizing will provide an ease to the junior lawyers to get access to the recent judgment of the court, “This is a free service available for lawyers across the country. Young juniors do not have to pay. There is an elastic search facility. We are improving upon the search engine by incorporating the followed, distinguished and incorporated judgements in a few weeks.” the CJI said.
Now common people and others could retrieve the verified and authorized judgments of the cases, which are approximately 34,000 made available on the Apex court website. “I have given a deadline of February 15 for judgments of 2022 also head-noted. With effect from today, all judgements will be placed online within 24 hours. The access will be placed on the mobile app which we had launched and also on the National Judicial Data Grid. There are about 34,000 judgments,” the CJI said.
These verdicts will be available on the apex court website, its mobile app and on the judgment portal of the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), the CJI said at the outset of judicial proceedings on the first working day of 2023.
CJI Chandrachud also gave emphasis over the introduction of ‘neutral citation.’
A Neutral citation is the unique reference given to a particular judgment by HM Courts and Tribunals service. No official neutral citations exist for cases before 2001. Unlike the majority of citations, neutral citations do not refer to a specific report of a case, but to the judgment itself. A neutral citation by itself therefore cannot be used to locate a law report without future research; however, it is particularly useful when citing or tracing an unreported case.
“We are also introducing neutral citations. Delhi and Kerala High Court already have it,” Chandrachud said. He said a committee comprising three judges — Justice Rajiv Shakdher of the Delhi High Court, Justice Raja Vijayaraghavan of the Kerala High Court and Justice Suraj Govindraj of the Karnataka High Court – has been constituted to work on the process of “neutral citations.”
The apex court also added in their statement that there a team has been formed, comprising of officials of Judges’ Library and Editorial Section, working together to upload and made available all judgments, through search engine, a database, developed by the supreme court with the NIC, Pune, only within a short span of 15 days.
The Supreme Court has developed a search engine with the help of the National Informatics Centre comprising elastic search technique in the database of e-SCR and the search facility in e-SCR provides for free text search, search within search, case type and case year search, judge search, year and volume search and bench strength search options, it said.
“I have given a deadline of February 15 for judgments of 2022 also head-noted. With effect from today, all judgements will be placed online within 24 hours,” CJI Chandrachud said.
“This is a project which, in essence, endeavours to take a step forward towards fulfilling the objective of digitization of Indian Judiciary and underlines the vision to bring in a positive change for the benefit of all the stakeholders of justice, primarily litigants and members of the Bar as also the High Courts, National Law University, Judicial Academies, etc,” the statement had noted.
The Electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) project is an initiative to provide the digital version of the apex court’s judgments in the manner as they are reported in the official law report – ‘Supreme Court Reports’.
“Digitization and scanning of Supreme Court Reports (SCR) from the year 1950 to 2017 and preserving the same in digitized soft copy in the format of PDF (Portable Document Format), assisted the Registry in creating a digital repository in the Supreme Court’s reported judgments in soft form,” the top court had said.
CONCLUSION:
Digital India was founded to promote inclusive growth in e-services, commodities, manufacturing, and job creation. This will pave a way to support and pull forward the youth toward digital literacy by accouterment a high level of platform. The digital platform forming a bridge to connect people from different part of the region. It has catered people to put head together, adding their innovation and notions in one bowl and bringing forth interesting ideas and contributing into the development of the country.
The supreme court has come forth, taking one more step in digitalizing India by introducing electronic report system.
BY: AYUSHI BHUSHAN, 1ST YEAR, BA.LLB(INTEGRATED), BANASTHALI UNIVERSITY, RAJASTHAN
