Confederation of Indian Industry, CII, had recently organised an eConference on 'Ease of Doing Business' with focus on 'Enforcement of Contract' in collaboration with Department of Justice, Ministry of Law & Justice, GOI.
The context was that the World Bank publishes ''Doing Business Report'' every year and ranks Countries on Ease of Doing Business. In 2014 India was 142nd rank on EoDB whereas in 2020 Report it has improved to 63rd rank out of 191 Countries. However as far as Énforcement of Contract is concerned India was 178th in 2016 and is now still at poor 163rd rank. India aspires to jump atleast 50 brackets by the time 2021 World Bank Report is published.
During the Conference Mr. Surinder S. Rathi, Member of eCommittee, Supreme Court of India started his address by congratulating Mr. Piruz Khambatta, Chairman of CII Task Force on EoDB and the CII for organizing the eConference in collaboration with Department of Justice, Ministry of Law & Justice, GOI. He also complimented Mr. Bharam Vakil, Founder and Senior Partner AZB & Partners Law Firm assisted by Mr. Rajender Barot, Mr. Barun Mitra, Secretary DoJ and Mr. G.R. Raghavender, JS for their presentations on the subject.
Mr. Rathi stated that now time has come that the Judiciary and other components of Justice Delivery System should look upon themselves as Service Providers and Litigants as Consumers of Justice. The Service Providers shall always be accountable to the Consumers for timely delivery of Justice and Judiciary is embracing Technology for achieving the same.
Coming to the challenges faced by the Country in elevating India’s position in Enforcement of Contract. He added that the issue needs to be looked upon in a macro manner as the disputes emanating from 'Enforcement of Contracts' are handled not only by the Commercial Courts but also by Adhoc and institutional arbitrators. He added that this issue was raised by him as a Member of Task Force on EoDB in DoJ that there is a need to have a wider strategy by strengthening the arbitrations eco system while simultaneously addressing the issues faced by Commercial Courts in the Country.
As regards the Judiciary, he shared that the issue of delays in disposal of cases has to be looked upon in perspective. He shared that as per National Judiciary Data Grid (NJDG) out of 3.45 Crore cases pending in the Country, there are 90.4 Lakh Civil cases pending in District Courts apart from 13 Lakh Civil cases in High Courts. 74% of these cases are pending more than one year while 13 Lakh cases are pending for more than 5 years, 4.77 Lakh cases pending for more than 10 years apart from around One Lakh cases pending from last more than 20 years. Pendency of Civil Disputes in the Courts for decades is not at all a healthy proposition. But again there is a need to have a holistic approach. He shared that Judge – Population ratio in the Country is 20 per million whereas the same is 56 and 102 in UK and USA respectively. This is only one of the areas of concern while there are several other issues which lead to delay in disposal of cases like lack of infrastructure, inadequate support staff, archaic procedural and substantive laws, lack of professionalism in the work culture amongst the Members of the Bar and like.
As mentioned adjudication of Commercial disputes by way of Adhoc and Institutional Arbitration is an important area which needs to be strengthened. India has a rich legal history and had reposed faith in Arbitrations by promulgating Indian Arbitration Act, 1899. It was succeeded by Arbitration Act, 1940 before the current Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 was brought in tandem with UNCITRAL Model. The same was amended in 2015 and lastly in 2019.
Even though now, the law provide that an arbitral award is akin to an executable decree, as per Niti Aayog, objection petitions filed under Section 34 of Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 takes upto 2500 days (around 7 years) to get through the District Court, High Court and Supreme Court. Somehow the fact that the arbitration in the Country is looked after Department of Legal Affairs under the same Ministry, the strategy adopted by them does not appear to be in tandem with work being done by DoJ for strengthening Commercial Courts. Lately, New Delhi International Arbitration Centre Act, 2019 has been promulgated but Nation needs to create more of Private Institutes for Arbitrations of International repute.
Lately Justice AK Sikri, Former Judge of Supreme Court of India and International Judge, Singapore International Commercial Court e-inaugurated Indian Dispute Resolution Centre. IDRC is India’s First of its kind Institutional ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) Centre which provides offline as also eADR ie ODR, Online Dispute Resolution, facility through its state of the art eArbitration, eMediation and eConciliation Software Portal. A completely paperless dispute resolution environment.
Mr. Rathi has an overview on the journey of Indian Judiciary in the IT World. He shared that eCommittee of Supreme Court of India was formed in the year 2004 on the request of Hon’ble Chief Justice of India. In 2005, eCommittee formulated a National Policy and Vision Document on Digitization of Judiciary. Under the Phase-I of eCourts Project, the 18,000 odd Courts in the Country were provided IT Hardware. Software applications were developed and they were connected with NICNET. In the Phase-II, Case Information System was developed for District Judiciary and High Courts. NJDG was developed as a National Repository of all the cases apart from development of eCourts Services Portal and Mobile App.
National Judicial Data Grid for District Courts and High courts
NJDG is the repository of the case data and as on 17.5.2020 there are 46,43,854 pending cases data of High courts and 3,23,56,686 pending cases data of District court available under NJDG. NJDG got the stamp of world bank and moved India 20 ranks forward.
eCourts website (ecourts.gov.in)
This is one of the star attraction of eCourts project and anyone can now get the Case Status; Court orders; Causelist 24 x7 all at a mouse click and that too in the comfort of the home.
District Court websites:
All the District Courts have launched their own websites to disseminate information related to District Courts using Drupal template and are put to maximum use by many High Courts for variety of uses at district level.
eCourts services Mobile Application:
The eCourts services Mobile Application launched on 22.07.2017 by the Hon’ble Chief Justice of India has reached more than 43 Lakh downloads. The mobile application comes with search options for Case Status; Court orders; Causelist with the key attraction “My cases” option where one can add the personal case number and can get updates.
SMS PUSH:
Case status is being sent automatically to the registered Advocates and litigants through SMS by the CIS 3.0 software using SMS push facility. From 2016 to June 2019, 12.23 crores SMS were sent to the litigants and Advocates who are registered with CIS software.
SMS PULL
For litigants who have no internet connection, the case details can be got through the SMS Pull application by sending unique CNR number (Case Number Record) to 9766899899 through SMS. The format of the SMS is Ecourts to 9766899899. The case details automatically will be sent as reply SMS to the user mobile.
Case information system software for all the District Courts (CIS 3.2)
The salient features of the common Case Information System 3.1 (CIS 3.1) are innumerable and few are as follows:
It is based on Open Source Solutions (FOSS).;
Case Number Record (CNR) – Unique Case number for all cases;
Bilingual available for Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada and Tamil;
Data Health Card feature inbuilt in CIS will reveal the missing data entries in CIS;
Hide Party Name option under CIS can be used by the family court, POCSO, Juvenile courts and by enabling it the identity of parties can be maintained confidentially;
Automatic Fetching of Trial court data by Appellate court: Using this option, the data regarding the Trial court can now be fetched under CIS 3.0 by the appellate court. By this option the second time data entry of the same case in the appellate court is avoided.
National code for Case Type Standardization and Unification
Case Type Standardization and Unification: The national codes have been prepared and shared with High Courts. The district courts can use their existing nomenclature but it would be mapped to National code for case type, Adjournment type, Purpose type and Disposal type through software. The exercise of tagging of national codes with existing code is being done at District Courts. Now, the national statistical reports can be generated.
JO Code (Judicial Officers Code)
All the Judicial Officers of the country are provided with unique JO code. The statistics about number of judicial officers and the performance assessment can be easily managed by using JO code.
Official Email Creation and Management
Official email IDs (25319) have been created for the Hon'ble Judges, Judicial Officers, Court establishments and Supreme Court Registry.
Virtual Court (vcourts.gov.in)
Virtual Court is aimed at eliminating presence of litigant or lawyer in the court to adjudicate the case online. The first Virtual Court in the country was inaugurated in Delhi on 26th July, 2019. Virtual Courts are functioning at Delhi, NBT Challan Delhi, Chennai, Pune and Faridabad.
JustIS Mobile App
A mobile App (JustIS) has been created for Judicial Management System. The judicial management, planning, monitoring and administrative decisions can be taken with the help of information generated through the National Judicial Data Grid and JustIS App.
NSTEP
National Service and Tracking of Electronic Process (NSTEP) is a mechanism consisting of centralized process service tracking application and a mobile app for bailiffs/process servers. NSTEP is used for speedy delivery of processes and reduce in-ordinate delays in process serving. NSTEP Mobile App provided to bailiffs, helps in real-time and transparent tracking of service. Once the process is published through CIS software by the respective court, it becomes available on the NSTEP web application in the electronic format.
eFiling
The e-Committee of the Supreme Court of India has designed and setup e-Filing system which enables, electronic filing of Legal papers. Using the e-Filing, Cases (both Civil and Criminal) can be filed before the High Courts and District Courts that adopt e-Filing system. Introducing of this e-Filing is aimed at promoting paperless filing and create time and cost saving efficiencies by adopting technological solution to file cases before courts in India. It is functioning under the following web address https://efiling.ecourts.gov.in/
ePayment of Court Fees
Online payment of Court Fees, Fine, Penalty and Judicial Deposits through https://pay.ecourts.gov.in is initiated. Citizens can now make payments online using this portal alleviating the use of Stamps, Cheque and Cash. ePayment portal is integrated with state specific vendors like SBI ePay, GRAS, eGRAS, JeGRAS and Himkosh etc.
eOffice
eOffice software application has been successfully implemented at the office of the eCommittee, High Court of Karnataka and Allahabad. It has been created to enhance the operational efficiency of the Govt. departments, through automating the work flow of administrative files in a paperless mode.
Automated emailing service to registered users
The CIS software will automatically send emails to Advocates, Litigants with status of the case, next hearing date, cause list and judgment/orders, if the user email is registered with CIS software.
WAN Connectivity
Under e-Courts Mission Mode Project Managed MPLS /VPN services was sanctioned by DOJ at the cost of Rs.169.61 crores and 2690 sites have been commissioned with WAN connectivity.
Training of Trainers
Master trainers (Judicial officers) and 219 Master trainers (Court Staff) were identified and trained as Master trainers who in turn trained 14,000 Judicial officers and 4000 staffs respectively.
eSewa Kendras
eSKs are being established as an One Stop Centre for access to all the services provided under eCourts Project. Considering that India is a vast country and most of the 3800 Court Complexes in the Nation are located at far flung areas where people don’t have access to IT hardware or network and lack the know how of it usage. eSKs are providing free of cost facilites like eFiling, eSignature and much more.
Interoperable Criminal Justice System (ICJS)
Lately, this ambitious project of MHA which was stalled for quite some time was taken by the eCommittee. ICJS aims at seamlessly exchanging data between the different pillars of Criminal Justice System viz. Judiciary, Police, Prisons, Prosecution, Forensics and other. ICJS is now ready for pan India roll out between Judiciary and Police Data pillars.
Video Conferencing
eCommittee has been instrumental in helping Supreme Court, High Courts and District Courts in adopting VC facility during the lockdown and has drafted model VC Rules.
Digitization of Judicial Data
eCommittee has undertaken this exercise to have a pan India uniform digitization of legacy data in deciding and pending of Judicial files as also current data i.e. digital documents being created in day to day functioning in the Courts and data collected through eFiling.
Artificial Intelligence in Judicial Domain
Mr. Rathi also shared that he is Member/Convener of Artificial Intelligence Committee of Supreme Court of India. AI Committee was constituted by Hon’ble Mr. Justice Ranjan Gogoi, the then Chief Justice of India and Hon’ble Mr. Justice S.A. Bobde (Current Chief Justice of India) was its first Chairman. He shared that Supreme Court has developed a dedicated open source Judicial Domain language translation tool named SUVAS (Supreme Court Vidhik Anuvaad Software) which has the capacity to translate Judicial documents from English to Nine vernacular languages (Marathi, Hindi, Kannad, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Gujarati, Malayalam and Bengali) and vice versa. He added that the translation of SUVAS AI Tool is underway and very soon the same will be available for Public utility.
He also shared about second project of AI Committee i.e SUPACE (Supreme Court Portal for Assistance in Court Efficiency). This SUPACE AI Tool is aimed at data mining, case querey tool, legal research and other usages for a leveraging quality and timely justice delivery by Judges.
In his concluding remarks, Mr. Rathi stated that eCommittee is now in the process of drafting a Vision document of Phase-III which included greater adoption of Artificial Intelligence tools, cloud computing, strengthening IT infrastructure, making all Courts paperless and VC enabled and like. He highlighted that lately decision has been arrived at to make all the Commercial Courts paperless in a limited timeframe so that the environment of Enforcement of Contract get strengthened and India’s position in same same gets a much needed boost.
Mr. Rathi also invited CII functionaries to share their expectations and suggestions to the Supreme Court on digitization and other aspects related to timely justice delivery system. He thanked the organizers for giving him an opportunity to share the work being carried out by the eCommittee of Supreme Court of India.
Picture Source :
