Introducing India’s first Court Downtime Tracker

Is it just me? She wonders, staring at her screen. The court website has failed her yet again. She frantically refreshes, reboots, switches browsers - nothing works. A colleague in the corner says, "It's working fine for me." The mystery never stops.

This isn't a one-off. It's just one example of the countless times each week that a court website fails to load for the average litigator, litigant, journalist, or legal researcher.

Things get worse as you move down the judicial hierarchy. Court websites - a basic tool that facilitates access to justice in the digital age - are riddled with poor functionality, clunky interfaces, missing orders, mangled judge names, algebraic captchas and more.

On this August 15th, we make our contribution to easing access to justice - independence from the endless cycle of refresh, reboot, recheck.

Our Court Downtime Tracker, a joint initiative by the CourtsDaily team and Bar & Bench, will now host a live, ticking tracker that continually monitors and records court websites across forums and shows their uptime status in real time.

While uptime tracking has long been standard practice in tech and other web-enabled service industries, the legal world has lagged behind.

As Siddarth Raman, CTO at The Professeer, put it in a recent piece, court website architecture requires reform across many dimensions. Being live and responsive 24/7 is the first and most fundamental step.

Shishira Rudrappa, Founder of Bar & Bench, adds that with the likely adoption of integrated payment systems on court websites - enabling lawyers to transact directly through the courts' digital interfaces - outages will become far more disruptive to legal practice and a real threat to litigants' access to justice.

This joint initiative will rapidly expand its coverage of court websites and soon roll out X alerts for court and tribunal website outages.

Until then, enjoy the "Is X Down?" equivalent for your favourite Indian court websites.

A product by TheProfesseer, in collaboration with Bar & Bench.