India’s judicial system has quietly crossed a staggering digital milestone. More than 637 crore pages of court records—spanning High Courts and district courts—have now been scanned and preserved under the Centre’s e-Courts Mission Mode Project, according to information placed before the Rajya Sabha.
The update came in a written response from the Union Law Ministry, which said that as of the end of 2025, High Courts alone accounted for nearly 237 crore digitised pages. District courts, often burdened with the heaviest caseloads, contributed another 400 crore-plus pages to the digital archive.
The Ministry acknowledged that progress had been slow in earlier years. Before the launch of Phase III of the project, fewer than 6% of legacy records across 21 High Courts had been digitised. That bottleneck is now being addressed head-on. The current phase targets the digitisation of roughly 3,100 crore documents—covering both old files and newly filed cases.
To ensure these records don’t vanish into poorly organised servers, a detailed Digital Preservation SOP has been rolled out. It sets standards for scanning, storage, retrieval and long-term safeguarding of judicial data, aiming to turn dusty paper trails into durable digital assets.
Phase III goes beyond scanning alone. The plan is to move courts closer to a paperless workflow, backed by customised software that allows judges, lawyers, litigants and even the public to view e-filed and scanned records online.
The financial push behind this transformation has been substantial. During Phase II of the e-Courts project, High Courts received ₹1,164.37 crore. Under Phase III, the government has released ₹2,473.8 crore between 2023 and 2026. The funding was spread across multiple years, with allocations rising sharply as the programme gathered momentum. Additional resources were also channelled to technical partners and institutions for connectivity, training and platform development.
Digitisation has also reshaped how courts function day to day. Virtual courts have processed nearly 9.81 crore challans nationwide, generating close to ₹973 crore in fines—mostly from traffic-related cases. Video conferencing, once an exception, has become routine: courts have already heard more than 3.93 crore cases through virtual hearings, with district courts accounting for the bulk of that number.
Together, the figures paint a picture of a judiciary in transition—one that is steadily replacing paper stacks with pixels, and court queues with screens.
