Supreme Court is officially onboarding with the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) portal: CJI DY Chandrachud

Today, the Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud announced that the Supreme Court is officially onboarding with the NJDG (National Judicial Data Grid) portal under the open data policy of the court. This is one “to bring transparency and accountability in the judicial domain.” Previously, the Supreme Court was out of the purview of NJDG whereas District Courts and High Courts were already integrated with NJDG. The NJDG gives real-time data regarding the pendency of cases in the Courts. The CJI said, “It is a historic day. It is a unique platform that is developed by the NIC and the in-house team of the Supreme Court. Now at the click of a button, you can see real-time info on the pendency of cases, year-wise, total pendency of registered and unregistered cases, and number of cases decided coram-wise.” In the courtroom, the CJI also displayed the webpage and said “At a glance, the webpage gives us the current year’s pendency of civil and criminal cases, the total pendency of registered and unregistered cases. And registered cases are those which are still defective and defects are not cured by the lawyers yet.”

Further, the CJI also showed the graphs on the NJDG related to the SC that highlight the number of cases pending and added, “You can see the number of cases in the previous months, the number of cases instituted and disposed of in the current year, and coram wise pendency of cases- three judges, five judges, seven judges, and nine judges.” He further added, “We have graphs to see the effect of the vacations in July - the disposal was 5500 as opposed to the institutions of 3115 cases - fresh lawyer minds and fresh judges I guess.” The CJI also mentioned that the use of the NJDG would help in organizing the work properly and said “There are just about less than 100 cases pending before the year 2000. This gives a data tool for the Chief Justice to reorganize work so that we can dispose of the oldest cases. Some benches will pick up these matters. 583 cases are pending before three-judge benches. I am proposing to constitute special benches to deal with these cases.” Additionally, he mentioned that they have to maintain data accuracy for which cleaning of data is necessary. He said “We also have to clean up our data so that the physical record matches the digital one. I thought we must match up to the High Courts and district courts, which are already on the platform.”