By Mansi Omar, Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Jupitice Justice Technologies
India’s judiciary has been on a digital transformation journey for close to two decades now. However, the massive infrastructure spending has not translated into process change on ground. The e-Courts Mission Mode Project’s Phase III alone carries a financial outlay of Rs. 7,210 crore. As a result, courts have conducted over 4.15 crore video-conferencing hearings and litigants can now pull case status on more than 20.63 crore cases and 17.77 crore orders and judgments through the National Judicial Data Grid.
That is a serious digital backbone, comparable in ambition to what India has built in payments and identity through UPI, Aadhaar and DigiLocker. But comparable ambition hasn’t produced comparable outcomes. The workflows sitting on top of the judiciary’s digital infrastructure, case filing, evidence handling, contract review, notice management, still run on the same manual logic they did before any of this existed.
Simply put, filing a document electronically is not the same as digitising the process that decides what happens to it next. That distinction, infrastructure versus process, is where the real gap sits, and it is why legal and regulatory operations have not moved anywhere close to UPI’s pace even with e-Courts running in parallel.
The Backlog Behind the Infrastructure
India’s courts carry one of the largest case backlogs anywhere in the world. Government data puts pending cases at roughly 5.39 crore, including over 63.66 lakh in High Courts and more than 92,000 in the Supreme Court. A meaningful share of that pendency is government litigation itself, with public bodies routinely named as parties in disputes that run for years. Regulators covering real estate, consumer protection and financial services carry a parallel version of the same problem: rising caseloads running through case-management systems built for a fraction of today’s volume.
Where digitisation has moved past infrastructure into actual workflow redesign, the results are measurable. More than 2,550 e-Sewa Kendras are now functional across High Courts and district courts, giving litigants without personal technology access a digital entry point into the system. On the dispute resolution side, the Samadhaan portal for MSME payment delays had digitally resolved more than 58,000 cases by mid-2025, run end-to-end without adding to court dockets. States running digital land records and RERA portals have cut processing timelines on property filings that used to take months. Each of these is a case of the underlying process, not just the paperwork, moving online. That is the harder and more valuable shift.
Three Things That Would Actually Close the Gap
Legal work resists automation for reasons that are structural, not technological. Closing the gap between India’s digital public infrastructure and its legal operations comes down to three shifts institutions can start making now.
First, treat workflow redesign as the actual project, not a side effect of new software. Digitising a form or a filing portal changes very little if the approval chain, the review logic and the escalation path behind it stay exactly as they were on paper.
Second, move to platforms that can absorb regulatory change without a rebuild. The rigid, hard-coded systems many institutions still run cannot keep pace with a shifting compliance environment. Configurable legal and governance platforms let institutions adjust workflows, hearings, notices and evidence handling as rules change, without a fresh development cycle each time. It removes the exact objection that has kept legal operations analog for this long.
Third, build the audit trail into the process itself, not around it. As AI tools enter legal workflows and regulators start expecting evidence of how a decision was reached, institutions that can produce that record natively, rather than reconstruct it after the fact, will be the ones equipped to handle what’s coming: rising caseloads, tighter compliance timelines, and a citizen base that has already seen what fast, digital-first service looks like everywhere else. Everyone else will keep running a digital front end over analog decision-making, and the gap will keep showing.
