Trial courts offline, algorithms online: Tamil Nadu Bar's ongoing court boycott

Once upon a time, courts asked only three questions: Is there urgency? Is there merit? Is there jurisdiction?

Today, in the trial courts of Tamil Nadu, it depends on scanner resolution, OCR accuracy and upload bandwidth.

From December 3, 2025 to January 7, 2026, and most likely beyond, trial court advocates across Tamil Nadu barring Chennai are boycotting courts. The cause is neither frivolous nor political. It is administrative, existential and deeply constitutional: the Madras High Court’s insistence on mandatory e-filing before physical filing, effective from December 1, 2025.

The intent behind this reform is clear: modernisation, transparency and efficiency. Digitisation promises faster record-keeping, easier retrieval and reduced loss of files, along with access to all documents by both parties. Yet, the lived reality in trial courts is quite different. A system designed to simplify justice has, in many instances, become a procedural bottleneck.

Traditionally, trial courts were spaces of urgency - emergency suits, interim injunctions, ad-interim relief matters, where time was of the essence.

Today, urgency is hostage to OCR-readable fonts, high-quality scanners, perfect spelling without even a minor error and uninterrupted access to systems that do not exist in adequate numbers.

In most district courts, the “e-filing infrastructure” translates to 2-4 systems for an entire court complex. Advocates queue not for justice, but for login access. A junior advocate must now sacrifice an entire working day merely to upload a case, not to argue it.

If a single correction by pen post typing escapes OCR detection, the system does not forgive. A pen correction acceptable for decades is now a digital sin. The entire page must be re-typed.

Justice is no longer blind; it is font-sensitive.

This mandate has tripled the workload of trial court advocates. Young lawyers, especially those who have just opened their offices, are the worst affected. To file one case, they must:

• Abandon court appearances,

• Suspend research,

• Forget conferences with clients,

• Sit before a computer screen, praying the upload is accepted.

This is not legal practice. This is outsourced clerical labour imposed without consent. The Bar was not consulted. Ground realities were not studied. Infrastructure was assumed, not verified.

Even before this mandate, registry scrutiny in trial courts was notorious for procedural rigidity. The e-filing mandate has not corrected that culture; it has digitised it.

The advocate now faces rejection not from a judicial mind, but from an algorithm that does not understand urgency, equity or hardship.

The ongoing boycott is not an act of arrogance. It is an act of professional survival. For many young advocates, daily court work equals daily income. A boycott means forced unemployment - without wages, without relief, without acknowledgment.

And yet, the High Court has chosen not withdrawal, but training sessions through its latest notification dated December 16, 2025 as the response to the boycott. Training advocates to endure a flawed system is not reform. It is institutional stubbornness disguised as capacity-building. This is a distress signal from the trial court Bar.

The Bar’s proposal is reasonable, workable and already practiced in substance: allow physical filing first. Let the Court’s own e-Court team digitise records after acceptance and numbering.

This ensures uninterrupted access to justice, uniform digital quality, reduced burden on advocates and actual efficiency.

But efficiency, it seems, is being measured not in justice delivered, but in files uploaded.

Courts exist to dispense justice, not to conduct digital endurance tests. When procedure begins to choke substance, constitutional courts must pause. Article 39A speaks of equal access to justice, not equal access to scanners. Article 21 protects livelihood, not OCR and clear-cut copies. Digitisation should be a post-admission process, not a gatekeeping ritual. If technology becomes a barrier rather than a bridge, it ceases to be reform.

Even the Supreme Court, the most digitised court in the country, retains hybrid filing, recognising India’s infrastructural asymmetry. If constitutional courts at the apex accept physical filing as a safety valve, what justification exists for trial courts to be more rigid than the Supreme Court itself?

Even the same Madras High Court that mandated e-filing in trial courts has not extended its mandate to its own premises. Judicial hierarchy does not mean technological absolutism flowing downward.

Trial courts serve agriculturists, daily-wage workers, senior citizens, women seeking urgent protection, tenants resisting illegal eviction, small business owners seeking contract enforcement, landowners facing property disputes, debtors and creditors in urgent financial matters, workers seeking labour or wage protection, people seeking urgent injunctions or protective orders.

They do not come with PDFs, searchable text, or metadata.

When a plaint is rejected for OCR failure or has to wait and work for days just to upload, it is not the advocate who suffers alone; it is the litigant who sleeps outside the courthouse waiting for justice that could not be uploaded. Digitisation that ignores rural India is not reform. It is urban privilege masquerading as efficiency.

Mandatory e-filing silently introduces a pay-to-enter model. One that requires high-end scanners, paid typing operators, dedicated office infrastructure, uninterrupted internet and software literacy.

This disproportionately favours large firms, senior practitioners and city-centric chambers. Young advocates and first-generation lawyers are effectively told: “Upgrade or exit.” That is not modernisation. That is economic gatekeeping.

The assumption that e-filing saves time is empirically untested. In reality, defective filings multiply, scrutiny objections increase, re-uploads consume days, urgent matters stagnate in “pending compliance”.

Time is not saved. It is redistributed from courts to advocates - unpaid and unacknowledged. The Bar is not against technology. It is against thoughtless imposition. Reform must walk with the slowest advocate, not sprint ahead leaving trial courts behind.

If justice must now pass through OCR, let the system first learn to read ground reality. Withdrawal or recalibration of mandatory e-filing is not retreat; it is judicial statesmanship.

Experimentation without safeguards is acceptable in tech startups, not in institutions dealing with liberty, property and livelihood. Trial courts are places where bail is decided, injunctions protect homes, maintenance feeds families.

They cannot be beta-tested.

The Constitution did not promise justice subject to bandwidth availability and scanner quality. Courts must remember: technology is meant to serve justice, not screen it. Hybrid filing at the trial court level is not regression, but constitutional pragmatism.

Aswin Rome Pon Saravanan is an advocate practicing in Tamil Nadu.