Two Indias, one judiciary: The uneven rise of virtual courts

On a Tuesday morning in a Bengaluru courtroom, a witness deposes over a crisp video link while the bench pulls up shared documents on a connected screen without missing a beat. 400 kilometres away, in a district court in Bihar, an identical hearing is far likelier to be adjourned - not because the law demands it, but because the internet connection will not hold, the webcam allotted to that court has been “borrowed” by another bench, or the one working laptop meant for virtual hearings is elsewhere that day.

This is the quiet contradiction sitting at the heart of India’s e-courts story: a judiciary that speaks fluently of digital transformation in its policy papers, yet delivers it at wildly different speeds depending on the pin code of the litigant.

The architecture for change has existed for nearly 2 decades. The e-Committee of the Supreme Court of India, working with the Department of Justice under the e-Courts Mission Mode Project, has pushed the system through three phases of digitisation. The Phase III vision document explicitly frames “access and inclusion” as the project’s central facets, promising a judiciary that works regardless of geography. On paper, the numbers are impressive: the government has repeatedly pointed to India's position as a global leader in virtual hearings, with tens of millions of cases heard over video links since 2020 and near-universal network connectivity across court complexes.

The catalyst for all of this was, of course, the pandemic. The Supreme Court's own order in Suo Motu Writ Petition (Civil) No. 5 of 2020 directed every High Court to frame rules enabling video-conferencing so that “the functioning of courts” could continue without exposing litigants, lawyers and staff to the virus. That single order did more to normalise the virtual hearing than a decade of policy documents had managed.

But an order directing every High Court to frame its own rules is also, structurally, an order that guarantees unevenness. Each High Court drafted its own video-conferencing rules, on its own timeline, calibrated to its own notion of what “adequate infrastructure” means. Some High Courts moved quickly to permit virtual filing, virtual bail hearings and even virtual recording of evidence. Others limited video-conferencing to short remands and adjournments, treating it as a stop-gap rather than a parallel mode of hearing. The result, nearly 6 years on, is not a single virtual courts system but 25 overlapping ones, each with its own thresholds for what litigants and lawyers can expect.

The disparity is not merely regulatory; it is physical. Metropolitan commercial courts and constitutional courts operate with dedicated bandwidth, backup power, trained registry staff and, increasingly, in-house technical helpdesks. Move down the judicial hierarchy to the taluka courts, the fast-track special courts, the courts hearing the bulk of India's undertrial matters and the picture changes. A single shared laptop for an entire court complex, intermittent electricity, poor last-mile connectivity in rural blocks and registry staff never trained to troubleshoot a frozen screen are the norm rather than the exception. For an undertrial prisoner whose bail hearing depends on a functioning video link from the district jail, this is not an administrative footnote; it is the difference between being heard this week or 3 months from now.

The e-Committee's own periodic newsletters and status reports track this gap with unusual candour. Quarter after quarter, they publish state-wise figures on the “status of implementation of rules of VC”, the volume of virtual hearings conducted in High Courts versus district courts and the spread between the best and worst-performing states remains stark.

The independent evaluation prepared for the e-Committee's Phase III vision is even more direct, cataloguing achievements alongside a frank list of persistent challenges patchy connectivity, uneven digital literacy among court staff and infrastructure funding that does not always reach the courts that need it most. What the data confirms is what any practitioner appearing across two or three states already knows instinctively: the quality of a litigant's access to a virtual hearing today has less to do with the merits of their case than with the state and, often, the specific court complex in which it happens to be pending.

This matters constitutionally, not just administratively. Article 21's guarantee of access to justice does not contemplate a tiered experience where the mode of hearing and the fairness that flows from being properly seen and heard depends on district-level infrastructure spending. A litigant in a well-equipped commercial court effectively gets a faster, more responsive judiciary than an undertrial in a poorly-networked district court, even though both are equally entitled to expeditious justice. Virtual courts were meant to be an equaliser, extending the reach of justice to those who cannot travel, cannot afford repeated adjournments, or are held far from the court hearing their case. Implemented unevenly, they risk instead becoming one more axis of inequality layered on top of the existing rural-urban and rich-poor divides in access to justice.

The fixes are neither complicated nor expensive, relative to the scale of the problem.

First, infrastructure funding under Phase III needs a floor guarantee for every court complex, a minimum bandwidth, a minimum number of functioning devices and backup power rather than funds that are technically sanctioned but slow to translate into working equipment on the ground.

Second, the e-Committee's model video-conferencing rules should move from being persuasive templates to binding minimum standards that every High Court must meet, with a public, court-wise compliance dashboard rather than a periodic newsletter.

Third, registry staff at the taluka and district level need sustained technical training and a functioning grievance channel, so that a frozen screen does not translate into a lost hearing date.

Finally, bar associations themselves have a role: consistently flagging infrastructure failures on the record, rather than quietly accepting adjournments, is what will keep the pressure on High Court administrations to fix what has been sanctioned but not delivered.

India does not lack the vision, the funding outlay, or even the judicial will to build a genuinely digital judiciary. The paper trail from the e-Committee's reports to the Supreme Court's own orders proves that much. What it still lacks is the discipline to make the last mile of that vision reach the courts that need it most, rather than only the ones that already photograph well. Until that changes, India will continue to have, in effect, two judiciaries: one that has already arrived in the digital age and one still waiting for the laptop to be free.

Sarvesh JP is a Project Associate (Research) at Bay of Bengal Programme Inter-Governmental Organisation.

Deepanjana Saha is Doctoral Researcher Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment.