Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud on Thursday made the historic announcement of the Supreme Court coming under the purview of the National Judicial Data Grid.
Calling the NJDG as a ‘unique and informative portal’ designed to disseminate crucial information from various judicial institutions for public discourse, the CJI said the flagship project of the E-Courts Mission was developed by the National Informatics Centre in close coordination with the in-house software development team of the Supreme Court with an interactive interface and analytics dashboard.
He said the platform was set to transform the way legal data was accessed and analysed, adding that data from the Supreme Court would be updated on NJDG on a real-time basis.
As per the CJI, now at the click of a button, users would be able to access comprehensive information regarding the institution, pendency and disposal of cases, types (civil or criminal), along with year-wise break-up of the Supreme Court of India.
Pointing towards the webpage, which displayed the current pendency of civil and criminal cases court wise, the CJI said the step, which was part of the Apex Court’s ‘open data policy,’ would bring transparency and accountability in the judicial domain.
He revealed that 80,000 cases were pending, while 15,000 were yet to be registered, which meant the data showed them as not pending.
As per CJI Chandrachud, the Supreme Court graphs showed disposal of more than 5,000 cases in July.
He said the distribution of the database was based on case type – civil or criminal, with the number of cases decided on the basis of quorum. Information could also be gathered on the total pendency of registered and unregistered cases year wise, added the CJI.
He said there were just about less than 100 cases before 2000. So, this gave a database for the CJI to get done with all the oldest cases. The Apex Court also needed to clean up its data so that the physical records matched the electronic ones, he added.
Stating that 583 cases were pending before three-judge Benches, the CJI assured to set up those Benches soon.
He further applauded the High Courts and the district courts for coming under the purview of NJGD before the Apex Court and said with the Supreme Court onboarding the NJDG portal, the flagship project has completed the full circle as all three tiers of the Indian judiciary were now on the unparalleled portal.
As per the Supreme Court Registry, NJDG has been recognised as a significant innovation under the ease of doing business initiative of the Government of India. It could be described as a national repository of data relating to cases instituted, pending and disposed of by the courts across the length and breadth of the country.