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 e-SCR project will serve as a valuable resource for legal professionals, researchers and scholars, providing them with easy access to the vast collection of judgements, which will be useful in legal research and analysis. The Chief Justice of India, while extending his greetings to the legal profession on the first working day of the year, also 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”.
Attorneys often cite reported judgments as persuasive authority when arguing their cases in court. One key resource for these reported judgments is the “Supreme Court Reports” legal journal.
The “Electronic Supreme Court Reports” (e-SCR) initiative is a project aimed at making digital versions of Supreme Court judgments available in the same format as they appear in the official “Supreme Court Reports” legal journal, providing an easily accessible resource for legal professionals, law students, and the general public.
A dedicated team of officials from the Judges’ Library and Editorial Section worked to create a searchable database in partnership with the National Informatics Centre in Pune. This effort was successful in digitizing 34,013 judgments within a period of 15 days, according to an 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 collaboration with the National Informatics Centre, has developed a search engine that utilizes elastic search technology to navigate the database of the e-SCR. This search engine allows for a variety of search options, including free text search, search within search results, case type and case year search, judge search, year and volume search, and bench strength search, according to an official statement released by the court.
