The Supreme Court of India on 14th September joined the National Judicial Data Grid platform which provides tracking of pendency of cases. Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud announced the step saying that this will integrate the Supreme Court’s real-time case data with the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) portal.
The portal will be updated in real-time and give details of all pending cases. “It is a historic day. It is a unique platform which is developed by the NIC and in house team of the Supreme Court. Now, at the click of a button, you can see real-time information on the pendency of cases, year-wise, total pendency of registered and unregistered cases, number of cases decided qoram-wise,” CJI DY Chandrachud said im the open court before starting the day’s proceedings.
“What we are doing for the High Courts and district courts should also be done for the Supreme Court,” the CJI added.
It is notable that district courts and high courts of the country are already under the National Judicial Data Grid, and with the Supreme Court joining it, the entire judiciary is now under the portal as all three tiers of the Indian judiciary are now on the NJDG portal. NJDG is recognized as a significant innovation under the ease of doing business initiative of the Government of India.
The NJDG portal is a national repository of data relating to cases instituted, pending and disposed of by the courts across the length and breadth of the country. Now with a click of a button, one may access case-related information, statistics such as institution, pendency and disposal of cases, case types, and year-wise break-up of the Supreme Court of India.
NJDG has been developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in close coordination with the in-house software development team of the Computer Cell, Registry with an interactive interface and analytics dashboard. The entire database shall be periodically updated on the NJDG portal.
NJDG is sui generis as it has brought transparency and accountability within the realm of the Indian judicial system by sharing all relevant data of cases instituted, pending and disposed of. The introduction of the portal has brought several benefits to the citizens like increased transparency, accountability and responsibility, improved efficiency, increased coordination, informed decision making, optimum deployment of resources and manpower, single source of data, and huge potential for high-quality research work.
PM Narendra Modi lauded the initiative by the Supreme Court to join the NJDG portal. He posted on X, “Laudatory step by the Supreme Court and CJI DY Chandrachud Ji. Such harnessing of technology will further transparency and enhance the justice delivery system in our country.”
Laudatory step by the Supreme Court and CJI DY Chandrachud Ji. Such harnessing of technology will further transparency and enhance the justice delivery system in our country. https://t.co/oAGZ03eOHY
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) September 14, 2023
The homepage NJDG portal has three different sub-portals, Supreme Court, High Courts, and District and Taluka Courts. All the portals feature a dashboard on the homepage which provides statistics of all the pending cases in all three levels of judiciary. It also has data on cases by category like criminal and civil, by age of the cases, by types of cases like original, appeal, application and execution, by stage of the case, and many other criteria.
Apart from the main dashboard, there are two more dashboards on the portals, the Pending Dashboard and the Disposed Dashboard, which provide detailed data on pending and disposed cases. The data is available for the entire country, for states, and for individual districts.
According to the portal, at present a total of 4,44,16,735 cases are pending in the district courts of India, which includes 1,10,59,799 civil cases and 3,33,56,936 criminal cases. 62.08% of the cases are over 1 year old.
The number of total pending cases in the Supreme Court is 80,501, including 62,946 civil cases and 17,555 criminal cases.
On the other hand, 60,72,047 cases are pending in the High Courts, which include 43,63,704 civil cases and 17,08,343 criminal cases.
