This article has been written by Arvind Jain.

The need for a Digital Judiciary 

• Are we proud to follow the Conventional Judicial System that is driven by:
  1. the Civil Procedure Code that was originally designed in 1908 [before 107 years] 
  2. the Criminal Procedure Code that was enacted in 1973 [before 43 years]

With a backlog of 35 lakh cases, we need ears of steel to read the rest of this petition. Inspite of getting freedom after losing patriots like Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Chandrashekar Azad and so many sacrifices of common people, We were so lazy that after getting freedom, we blindly imitated the same Legislative, executive and judicial system, that was used to enslave us; We failed to put in place – an Executive and a Judicial system, that is customised for our People. Many judges pride themselves in quoting and following the Privy Council thoughts, but the Dignified Indians who actually fought for freedom, hated these thoughts the most, for many valid and life-betting reasons. It was like After Independence only the colour of the skin changed, in the Governing Bodies. Something as a confused bird that struggled and bled for centuries to break a cage and finally married the cage itself. 

We did not innovate our own judicial systems and procedures but still follow the Common Law System that British dumped on us, 2 centuries ago. On the contrary many Indians contributed to (a): designing the processors of Intel and Motorola that drive 50% of the Computers in the World and (b): developed algorithms and systems for devices of Microsoft, Samsung and Apple that have transformed the way Mankind lives in the last 20 years. The Indian Judiciary still measures time in days and not in hours and seconds. It still asks a litigant to appear on a day and wait for the whole day, until that case is called. It’s easy for an Investor to write off something as a Loss than wait, expend & worry for years in the ends of justice or equity. 

• Internet, Email and Whatsapp is used by almost all Statutory Bodies, Central and State Officials to collect more taxes, store tax returns, share critical data to get Indian People to “follow” the law and even share jokes and rumours about celebrities. The entire Banking Industry and the Gambling Industry that involves transfer of billions of dollars every day is being driven by the Internet and the losses due to any system errors is negligible. 
• The Judiciary in the USA and Singapore has adopted electronic filing.. If the Indian Judiciary adopted these tools to electronically handle all documents and filing of documents before itself, a lot of credibility, dignity and respect would be showered on the Judiciary by litigants who wait beyond frustration. 

Limitations of the Conventional Judicial System that are shocking to the current Hi-Tech Society

Conventional Judicial system uses the Trial Court Judges like a hammer and deploys them in every possible job. Electronic Judicial Systems can directly access and activate the Judicial intelligence of a Judge and use that for a speedy justice. 

• Waste of Litigant’s time: Many Litigants prefer to forget their losses and hate to go to the Court. Litigants wait the whole day or half-a-day just to (a) file a paper (b) pray for time or (c) have their matter kept-by. Lakhs of such Litigants lose the whole day or half a day just to reach the Courts and say one sentence, before the court and collect the date. Not only: 
  1. lakhs of Litigants lose their half-a-day’s earnings, 
  2. India loses their contribution to its growth and this loss is unmeasured, 
  3. The State and Central Government loses taxes worth crores of rupees every day. 

For a developing nation like India and its politicians, every rupee in tax, matters a lot. 

• Wasting the time of Judges and Lawyers: Before a person is appointed as a judge, he or she undergoes a minimum 22 years [2+10+2+3+3+ 2 or 3] of Education and Training as an intern, lawyer and also as a Judicial Trainee. The precious time of an educated, such an experienced and such a well-trained resource like a Hon’ble Judge – gets wasted in: 
  1. Recording Evidence: that can be done more accurately by a video camera. 
  2. Calling cases in the fresh morning hours of the day: that can be done by a smart card attendance recorder or any undergraduate clerk. 
  3. Granting Bail for bailable offences: Which can be done by any clerk.
  4. Issuing summons by Amina, RPAD, Newspaper Publication: that can be automated even by an IVRS [Interactive Voice Responsive System].
  5. Calling out cases: After breakfast, when a human mind has the highest level of energy and freshness – guess what a lawyer and a judge are supposed to do? A judge has to take attendance of all parties present in the court, and a lawyer has to run in all the courts to ensure that his attendance is marked and his schedule for the rest of the day is confirmed. On an average 1 hour per day is lost. IN some courts 2 hours are lost every day. This means 12.5% to 25% of a lawyer’s and a Judge’s time is lost without any judicial gain. 

• Judges over-worked like a hammer at every step: Many mechanical-processes in the conventional Judicial System is burdened upon the Judge, like: 
  1. SUMMONING PROCESS: can be managed by a well trained clerk and all forms of summons should get issued by payment of fees. Even uneducated criminals in India know how to dodge the service of court summons and delay the judicial process for years together. 
  2. FRAMING OF ISSUES: Many judges take months to frame an issue. It would be very easy if Judges ask for a draft of Issues, from both parties and then choose the issues that are relevant.
  3. CROSS EXAMINATION: in every court, Statement of the Witness is dictated by the judge and typed by a stenographer. This form of recordings fails to record the body language of the witness and Witness’s belief on the facts sworn. I have seen cases where it has taken 5 years to cross examine a Witness. Moreover when the examination goes so long, there is a lot of analysis and after thought in manipulating the facts. This form of expensive and cumbersome recording only creates a few kgs of paper, that is good enough to hide the facts in thousands of words. In those days, video cameras were very expensive or just not available. Today every cell-phone has a video camera. 
• Conventional Judicial Systems of India, cannot accept documents in video and sound formats: With current features in mobile phones, it is much easier to communicate in video and voice format, than in written text format. Even though Mankind is more comfortable in accepting information in video and Sound format, but, the Judiciary has never thought of accepting Plaints/Evidence/ Arguments in these simpler formats. (Judges being) humans have also realised that complex information is better understood in Sound and Video format, than in paper format. God knows for how many more years would Judges have to process ONLY Written Documents and Oral Submissions. The life of Judges would be easy if they are offered arguments and petitions in the form of Audio and Videos. 
• Judge has to Redo the Lawyer’s job: While writing a Judgement or an Interim order, the Judge has to rewrite what all the parties have pleaded, objected, proved and argued. The mechanical reproduction of whole-case consumes 10 times more labour than the Analytical and the Operative part of a Judgement, direction or an Order. Its impossible to “copy” and “paste” from a lawyer’s documents in the current conventional Judicial system. But this can be done at 10 times the speed, if all the documents and arguments are provided electronically and stored in a Computer-System at the office of a judge. With modern computers that display different documents on multiple monitors, A judge can decide on the matter in minutes rather than in days. 

Glimpse of the E-filing process that may be Implemented in Courts

• Process of E filing of documents: is enabling lawyers to file judicial documents by sending an email-attachment of the document to the court-registrar’s email id, and email id of the other litigants. The registrar updates the order-sheet of that case number, and sends a soft electronic copy to all litigants. Original or certified copies of documents be accepted by Courier or in the filing Counters and acknowledgements issued on the spot. Google, Facebook and others have given us numerous free tools like gmail, google-groups, whatsapp-groups, etc. to rapidly enable e-filing in the Judiciary. All courts have numerous computers; only more Internet bandwidth is needed. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. have enough freely available online tools to enable said E-filing process.
• For every case, a separate gmail or Whatsapp group can be formed and case number will be the name of the group. This virtual-group will comprise of. the Judicial Officer / Judge b. All the Litigants c. The Registrar of that Court and all the appellate Courts. Once all the parties are summoned and taken on record, then the Plaint and accompanying IAs can be filed in the Group by the Registrar. Subsequently all future documents can be filed in the Group by any Litigant as the case progresses. Anything filed in the Group would get shared to all members of the group, and may become a part of the case-records, unless any other party opposes it. Depending on the stage of the case, the software will automatically direct the parties to file objections, arguments, evidence, applications, etc. In 90% of the cases, no parties will have to appear before the Court, till the case gets over. The Judge may be empowered to call for a physical hearing of all parties by giving a 7 days notice, on an application of any party or suo-motto. 
  1. Whenever An appeal has to be filed in this case, the Registrar of the Appellate Court has to forward the entire group documents to the Appellate Judge and include the Appellate Judge in the Group. 
  2. This system enables parties/lawyers to file video-arguments and avoid personal appearance before the Court. Video Arguments can be enriched by subtitles, voice and sound effects and they can be made shorter, smarter and more effective. 

Advantages of digitising Judiciary

• This will enable (a)Filing of Plaint (b)Written-Statement/Objections (c) Interim Application and its objections and (d) All written Arguments to get automatically added to the case records, without any manual intervention of the Judge. Time saved 1 to 4 years in most Civil Suits. 
• 80-90% of the Judge’s time will be saved, because Parties/Counsels have to come before judges only for verbal arguments and emergency-interim-reliefs only. If lawyers submit their videos, they need not even come for verbal arguments. 
• E-filing will enable filing of arguments not just in written-text format, but also in sound-files, video files, animation-formats, etc. The latter formats of sound video and animation enable more complex-communications in a shorter time. This will enable the Judge to reach faster to the roots of the case and adjudication time will be reduced by more than 90%. 
• Composing of Judgements will be 3 times faster: currently the judge has to reproduce each plaintiff-defendant’s versions, all their evidence and all their arguments in the order sheet. This makes 80% of the judgement. This entire job can be done by simple cut and paste operations by any clerk in 20min to 2 hours and forward that to the judge. Now the judge has to only declare the facts proved, the facts not proved, the evidence accepted, evidence ignored, arguments accepted and arguments ignored. This could be done by colouring: 
  • the accepted facts, evidence, laws, ratios/ arguments in green; 
  • the rejected facts, evidence, laws, ratios/arguments in red; 
  • the ignored facts, evidence, laws, ratios/arguments in brown.

This could be followed by the reasoning he uses to conclude the final Order and Decree. 

• Time of Appellate Courts will be Saved: If accepted/rejected/ignored facts, evidence, laws and ratios are coloured differently the chances of bias are greatly reduced. It becomes very easy for the appellate court to trace the errors of the trial Court and quickly pass the rectified orders. 
• More Transparency: Electronic filing will enable more transparent judgements in a shorter time. Supervision of Judiciary will be very easy, because the comments noted by Judges on all files could be made visible to the Public. 

Probable Solutions

• To modify CPC and CrPC with new provisions or REWRITE new procedural laws that:
  1. Enable a lawyer to file documents by emailing to the Court Registrar.
  2. enable to Court registrars to accept various file formats (including Powerpoint, excel, Image (jpg), sound (mp3) and video (mp4) and other popular formats) as a judicial document (that would be added to the records of a case and electronically shared with the Hon’ble Judge and all litigating parties). 
  3. Reserves the time of a Judge only for Judicial examining, analysis and conclusions. 
  4. Saves the time of a Judge from all routine mechanical jobs by transferring those jobs to clerks. 
  5. Enable an Appellate, Writ or Supreme Court to directly see the electronic records of any case running in its respective lower courts and monitor the activities of all subordinate judges. 
• To enable emailing and filing of Electronic documents like voice files, video files and PowerPoint files which can be added to the record of any case. 
• To save Indians from the “torture of waiting” in the courts. 

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