Launch of Electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) Project” – Chief Justice of India, D.Y. Chandrachud announces on Monday
The Chief Justice of India, D.Y Chandrachud, announced the launch of the electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) project on Monday. The initiative aims to improve accessibility to the approximately 34,000 judgements of the Supreme Court by making them available to the legal community, law students, and the general public, free of charge. The judgements can be accessed through the official website of the Supreme Court, its mobile application, and the judgement portal of the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG). This move towards digitalization is a significant step in ensuring that the legal community and the public have easy access to the vast wealth of knowledge and precedent set by the country’s highest court.
The Chief Justice of India, who was preside alongside Justice P S Narasimha, extended his greetings to the legal profession on the first working day of the year and subsequently provided an update on the electronic case management system projects currently in progress.
“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.
He stated that judgements issued up until January 1, 2023, will be made accessible to the public at this time.
“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.
“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”.
Counsel, when arguing their cases in court, frequently rely on reported judgements as supportive authority for their legal positions by referencing legal journals such as the ‘Supreme Court Reports.’
The Electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) initiative is an effort to provide digital versions of judgments issued by the Supreme Court in the same format as they are reported in the official legal report, the ‘Supreme Court Reports’, which is easily accessible to legal professionals, law students, and the general public.
A team comprising officials from the Judges’ Library and Editorial Section worked tirelessly to create a database suitable for the search engine developed by the Supreme Court in partnership with the National Informatics Centre in Pune. This effort resulted in the successful division of 34,013 judgments within a period of 15 days, as per the official statement released by the Supreme Court.
“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.
“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 Supreme Court, in partnership with the National Informatics Centre, has developed a search engine that utilizes elastic search technology within the database of the e-SCR. This search engine allows for a variety of options such as free text search, search within search results, case type and case year search, judge search, year and volume search, and bench strength search, as per the official statement released by the court.
