Helping and hindering justice

Source: The Hindu 

Syllabus: GS 2 Judiciary, Digital divide & health

Relevance: To understand eCourts initiative

Synopsis: Pandemic exposed the eCourts system to the outer world. Digitization enabled Judiciary to respond the online world. However, many challenges also surfaced which need careful consideration.

Judiciary pointed that despite CoWIN initiative,there were many digital impediments to the delivery of the vaccine. These include:

• Digital literacy and connectivity
• Inadequate digital literacy across the country
• Inadequate digital penetration
• Issues of bandwidth and connectivity

These could result in the exclusion of a large segment of population. Government soon responded by saying CoWin registration would not be mandatory.

Challenges in e-Courts

What Judiciary said about the delivery of Vaccines is equally true about Justice. It is true that Judiciary rose to the challenge posed by Covid 19 and adopted electronic mode at a great pace.

Supreme Court introduced the system of e-filing and artificial intelligence-enabled referencing. This effort is not just to counter pandemic, it also seeks to improve efficiency and transparency to tackle judicial pendency. It also seeks to make it cost-effective and reachable for all the litigants.

However, technology alone should not be seen as a panacea which will completely cure the Judiciary:

• Experience shows that despite digitization of Judiciary, from Phase 1 of eCourts since 2007, the current performance of Judiciary during pandemic left a lot to be desired.
• In fact, pendency reached an all-time high and rose sharply by 18% between December 2019 and December 2020.
• During the same period, High courts witnessed an increase in pendency by 20%.
• Just like vaccination procedure was adopted after rigorous trials, judicial procedures should first be subject to trials.

What is the way forward

Based on our experience of performance during the pandemic, we should adopt evidence based rational approach.

• First, we should focus on filling vacancies that are reported to be as high as 38% in Higher Courts and 22% in lower courts by India Justice Report 2020. Like doctors, even Judges cannot be replaced by bots of technology.
• Second, given the digital divide, it should not further accentuate the power divide between the citizens.
• Third, the shortage of technical infrastructure at times is slowing the procedure and access to justice. This needs to be immediately rectified.

E-Courts Project Phase III

These projects aim to address judicial digital deprivation.

• It envisages reengineering of procedures to make courts ‘natively digital’
• This demands additional training of the staff and tailoring systems to meet the demands of the digital world.