Last week, I wrote about the daily misery of using an Indian court website: unreachable when you need it and unreliable when you reach it. It is tempting to conclude that maybe courts just need better designers and web developers. After all, they could hire the best in the country tomorrow and rebuild every website within a month. But that won’t change anything.
A court website is an access layer to an underlying data set that compiles case events — filings, listings, orders, and adjournments — that must be updated regularly with every case. Think of it as a window that lets you peek into a house. Painting the window or changing the interiors will only change how things look. It won’t fix the shaky foundation the house was built on.Computerising the courtrooms
The eCourts project is nearly two decades old. It began in 2007 after the Supreme Court’s e-Committee prepared an action plan in 2005. That original plan was almost entirely about infrastructure. How to get courtroom computers, laptops, operating systems, Wi-Fi and training. There was little to no focus on data management — how a case should be identified, what forms part of its process record, how the provenance or the history of an entry is established, or who is responsible for maintaining its integrity.
