When the court live-streams a draft order: The transparency gap

On May 12, the Supreme Court dismissed a miscellaneous application in Fakir Mamad Suleman Sameja v. Adani Ports and Special Economic Zones, confirming that the digitally signed order is the Court's only final and binding expression. It added that the dictation given to the court-master in open court is a skeletal draft, subject to correction and enhancement in chambers before signing.

The ruling is doctrinally defensible. It is also, read against the Court's own open-justice jurisprudence, in unresolved tension with itself.

The facts are specific. On January 27, 2026, a bench of Justices J.K. Maheshwari and Atul S. Chandurkar disposed of a civil appeal concerning the resumption of gauchar land in Navinal village, Gujarat, allotted to Adani Ports. Respondents who watched a YouTube livestream of the hearing believed the dictated order protected the land — it included a status quo direction and left a pending PIL alive before the Gujarat High Court. The signed order, uploaded on February 12, omitted the status quo direction and disposed of the PIL altogether. The respondents filed a miscellaneous application. The Court dismissed it, imposed costs of Rs. 2,000 on each applicant, and held that the application was "a gross abuse of process of law" and an attempt to "undermine the dignity of the Court."

The doctrinal result is correct. The signed order is, and should be, final. That is not the question this piece asks.

The applicants invoked Article 145(4) of the Constitution, which provides that "no judgment shall be delivered by the Supreme Court save in open Court." Their argument was that dictation in open court constituted delivery and that the signed order produced in chambers could not override it. The Court rejected this reading, drawing a firm distinction between dictation to the court-master and pronouncement of judgment. Dictation, the Court said at paragraph 27, is only "the skeletal framework for the order" — a memory aid for the judge, not a legal act. Signing is what transforms the draft into a judgment.

That distinction has a long pedigree. Surendra Singh v. State of UP (1953) held that a judgment is nothing but a draft until formally delivered as the judgment of the Court. Kushalbhai Ratanbhai Rohit v. State of Gujarat (2014) applied this in a criminal context, holding that until a judgment is signed and sealed, it is not a judgment and can be changed or altered at any time prior to such signature. The line of authority is clear.

But the Court did not address the constitutional question the applicants actually raised: whether the act of live-streaming open court dictation changes what Article 145(4) requires, or at least what it means in practice. The applicants cited Article 145(4) at paragraph 7 of the order; the Court reproduced the provision and moved on. That silence matters.

In Swapnil Tripathi v. Supreme Court of India (2018), a three-judge bench held that live-streaming of Supreme Court proceedings is a constitutional imperative. It flows, the Court said, from the right to access justice under Article 21 and the right to know under Article 19(1)(a). The Court grounded the open court principle directly in Article 145(4), noting the constitutional mandate that judgments be pronounced in open court. One of the specific benefits the Court identified for live-streaming was that it would reduce reliance on potentially inaccurate secondary reports; it would let the public see proceedings directly, rather than depending on journalism or hearsay.

Fakir Mamad does not overrule Swapnil Tripathi, but it creates a structural problem the Court has not yet resolved.

If live-streaming exists to give the public direct access to what happens in open court and what happens in open court is a draft that does not bind anyone, then the constitutional value the Court identified in Swapnil Tripathi is not what it appeared to be. The public is not watching the Court deliver justice in real time. It is watching the Court produce a preliminary record, which may or may not resemble the operative order that emerges from chambers two weeks later.

The Court's answer in Fakir Mamad that dictation is merely practical, a tool for managing a docket of 71 matters on the day in question, is honest. But it makes the Swapnil Tripathi framework harder to sustain at face value. That framework rested on the idea that open court proceedings are the site where judicial decisions become public. Fakir Mamad says, with equal clarity, that the operative decision is made in chambers.

The obvious counter-argument is that this tension is not new. The dictation-pronouncement distinction predates live-streaming. Courts have always produced draft orders in open court and signed final orders later. Swapnil Tripathi did not change the underlying doctrine; it only expanded the audience that could watch the draft being produced.

This is true. But it does not fully answer the problem.

Before live-streaming, the gap between dictation and signed order was largely invisible to the public. The press reported what was said in court. Litigants present in court knew the outcome. Others waited for the signed order to be uploaded. The informational asymmetry was expected and accepted.

Live-streaming collapsed that asymmetry deliberately and constitutionally. The Court in Swapnil Tripathi wanted the public to see proceedings as they unfolded, to build trust in the judicial process and reduce dependence on second-hand accounts. But if what unfolds live in court is not what binds the parties, the transparency that live-streaming provides is partial in a way the Court has not acknowledged. The public sees a proceeding. It does not see the judgment.

The UP Housing & Development Board judgment, cited approvingly by the Court in Fakir Mamad at paragraph 11, actually sharpens this point. That case held that if an order dictated in open court is "later changed behind the back of the parties, it is bound to give rise to unhealthy suspicion and doubts in the mind of the litigant adversely affected". The Court in Fakir Mamad resolved those doubts by declaring the changes non-material. But the live-streamed record remains. The public saw one order, the parties are bound by another.

The gap here is not that the dictation doctrine is wrong. It serves a real institutional function. Requiring judges to produce final, reasoned orders under the time pressure of a 71-matter cause list would slow the Court considerably. The doctrine of corrective signing is a practical necessity.

The gap is that the Court has not told us what live-streaming of dictation actually means in constitutional terms. Does the public's right, under Swapnil Tripathi, to witness "proceedings as they unfold" include the right to watch a draft being produced? Or does that right attach only to the signed order which is never broadcast and may not be uploaded for weeks?

These are not rhetorical questions. They strike at the coherence of the Court's own open justice framework. A court that mandates transparency in its proceedings while holding that those proceedings do not produce binding legal acts owes an explanation of what transparency, in that context, actually means.

Kshitij Saruparia is a graduate from NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.