Five strategic levers for court transformation

This article is the third in a three-part series on judicial transformation based on the experience of PUCAR (Public Collective for Avoidance and Resolution of Disputes).

The first article in this series argued that judicial reform has been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking how to move cases faster, we should understand the people who are part of these cases and their incentives. The second tested five beliefs that quietly shape how courts are designed, and found each one wanting.

This third piece answers a question we kept getting asked as drivers of court transformation: if you could do only five things, what would they be?

These are not proposals drawn from theory. They are levers we have observed that can have the biggest return on investment. The levers we are willing to stand behind. 

Small payments cause significant delays. When a summons is issued, lawyers must pay ₹1 as a court fee, buy postal stamps worth ₹60 and physically hand over an envelope to the court. It sounds trivial, but conversations with practicing lawyers and litigants indicate that non-payment contributes to significant delays in at least a third of cases. Data from e-courts indicates that many hearings are adjourned because petitioners are yet to “take steps” to payment.  

The problem isn’t the amount or willingness to pay. It is design. In the chaos of a lawyer’s day, tiny tasks are the easiest to forget. They’re remembered days or weeks later, which means the date mentioned in the order has already passed and the delay has quietly compounded into the system. 

We can design around this. Take payments upfront at the time of case filing. Eliminate the ₹1 fee entirely. Integrate with ePost, so physical stamps become unnecessary and lawyers can make digital payments. 

When we look at payment structures across judicial processes, we see a pattern. Courts demand multiple small payments from users to move a case forward: for date changes, for delay condonation applications, for securing certified copies of orders. We have littered the road to resolution with unnecessary speedbumps. These are minor frictions waiting to be solved.  

Another type of friction typically peaks during institutional exchanges. Summons leave the court and enter the postal system. Warrants leave the court and enter the police system. They are returned with updates on the status of delivery. Payments pass through multiple channels. At each crossing, the manual work begins.

What we observed was bench clerks carrying a disproportionate share of this burden - manually printing, preparing, scanning and updating the status of documents that, in a connected system, would happen automatically. Digitisation, counterintuitively, had made this worse: more scanning, more data entry, more steps, without the back-office integration that would make those steps unnecessary.

The opportunity is straightforward to describe, but harder to execute. Courts can leverage digitisation across institutions like post, police and treasury by integrating with them through APIs. The High Court of Kerala has enabled integration with the e-post system for summons issuance, and with i-cops for tracking the status of warrants. Integration with systems like cheque truncation can streamline evidence submission reducing the need for court staff to manage physical records. 

Digitisation without interoperability is renovation without plumbing. The walls look new, but nothing flows.

We can digitise court processes, enable e-filing, dashboards and online payments. We can give the train a new engine. But it is still running on tracks laid a century ago: the rules.

Consider signatures. Every filing and many orders require signatures. In a physical world, this meant picking up a pen. In a digital world, it means multiple OTPs - each one a separate authentication event. We demand multiple signatures for a single case. It is compounded when banks file in bulk, or a judge has to issue the same order across hundreds of cases. A single signature or OTP seems minor, but when we look at the entirety of the system, these drops of friction become an ocean wall of inconvenience. What made sense for paper becomes a source of fatigue and delay online.

Or consider hearings. Most procedures still assume that “real work” happens only when all parties are physically or virtually present at the same time. Yet, many actions to take a case forward like: filing surety, entering a plea, submitting a vakalatnama or requesting a rescheduling, can happen asynchronously. A lawyer could file at night; a judge can consider at any time within the next 48 hours. Similarly, a judge can set bail, accept mediation reports or reissue warrants asynchronously. But because the rules don’t imagine this, everyone takes the safest route: wait for the next hearing.

We need to evolve our rules to match the world we live in. 

Securing the appearance of the accused is the most challenging part of a cheque dishonour case. 

When the postal route fails to make an accused appear, the instinct is to escalate; to issue a warrant for arrest to the police. On paper, this looks like pressure. In practice, it is the judicial equivalent of adding more cars to a traffic jam. We already know that getting the litigant to court is the hardest part of the process. The warrant stage takes the longest - well over six months if not longer. 

Police have limited staff, vehicles and hours. They already have more warrants than they can meaningfully execute. 

The argument isn’t to argue that the police don’t have a role, or are incapable of performing their function. But we have never seriously asked: who else could play this role? What new actors or institutions could support courts in securing appearance more reliably, more humanely, with less cost to everyone? A court that has asked this question is already ahead of one still waiting for warrant returns that will never come.

In the cases we tracked, bail amounts clustered in a remarkably narrow band, regardless of the specific circumstances of the case. And yet, the system revealed this amount only after the accused appeared in court and pleaded not guilty. The accused then had to scramble: arrange sureties, gather documents, return for more hearings. Many cases do not progress because the accused needed time to arrange bail.

If bail amounts are effectively standardised, why reveal them at the last moment? A small redesign could have a big impact: communicate bail requirements along with the summons. Give the accused time to arrange the funds and sureties before the first appearance. Digital platforms like DigiLocker already allow safe sharing of underlying documents – ID, tax returns, property records. Used well, they can sharply reduce the effort and time in preparing for bail.

The broader principle: if a decision is effectively standardised, move it earlier. Don't wait for information you don't actually need.

There is no single solution, software, or feature that will fix Indian courts. What we have learned is that transformation will come from the compounding effect of levers like these - pulled consistently, across institutions, by people willing to coordinate across the boundaries that have always made coordination hard.

The path is incremental. But incremental is not the same as slow. A payment collected earlier, a queue examined honestly, a rule rewritten for the world we live in - each change is small. Together, over time, they are not.

They require a willingness to get close enough to see them. Reform does not always announce itself. Sometimes it arrives as a quiet question: why are we still doing it this way? And the honest answer, more often than not, is simply this: because no one has looked carefully enough to ask.

Supriya Sankaran is the co-founder of Agami and PUCAR.

Siddarth Raman is Senior Research Lead at XKDR Forum.