- The Supreme Court has announced the onboarding of its case data on the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG).
- With this, the flagship project of the e-Courts project completes the full circle.
National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG):-
- The National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) is a database of orders, judgements and case details of 18,735 District and Subordinate Courts and High Courts.
- It was created as an online platform under the phase II of centrally sponsored scheme eCourts projects.
- Data is updated on a near real-time basis by the connected Districts and Taluka courts.
- It provides data relating to judicial proceedings/decisions of all computerized district and subordinate courts of the country.
- All High Courts have joined the NJDG through web services, providing easy facility to litigant public.
- The platform has been developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in close coordination with the in-house software development team of the Computer Cell, Registry of Supreme Court, with an interactive interface and analytics dashboard.
- In the Ease of Doing Business report for 2018, the World Bank had praised NJDG, that it made it possible to generate case management reports, thereby making it easier to enforce contracts.
Key Features:
- The Open Application Programming Interface (API) has been provided to the Central and State Government to allow easy access to the NJDG data using a departmental ID and an access key.
- This feature has been aligned with National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP).
- Case data is available for both civil and criminal cases with the ability to perform drill-down analysis based on the age of the case as well as the State and District.
- Recently, reasons for delay has also been included in NJDG which will help in keeping proper track on issues with the judiciary faces .
- Apart from this, individual reason for delay highlights the problems at a granular level.
Significance:
- NJDG work as a monitoring tool identify, manage and reduce pendency of cases.
- It helps to provide timely inputs for making policy decisions to reduce delays in disposing of cases and helps in reducing case pendency.
- It also facilitates better monitoring of court performance and systemic bottlenecks, and thus, serves as an efficient resource management tool.
- To track cases related to land disputes, Land Records data of 26 States have been linked with NJDG.
- The NJDG portal remains unparalleled, and the same is accessible at a click of a button to its citizens.
- The benefits of the portal can be summed up as under:
- increased transparency
- accountability and responsibility
- improved efficiency
- increased coordination
- informed decision making
- optimum deployment of resources and manpower
- single source of data
- huge potential for high-quality research work
Source - Indian Express