New Delhi, February 11
The Supreme Court of India emerged a global leader by conducting 1,81,909 virtual hearings till January 8 this year since the beginning of the lockdown period, the Law Ministry informed Parliament on Friday.
In a written reply, Law Minister Kiren Rijiju said the High Courts (57,39,966 hearings ) and subordinate courts (1,08,36,087 hearings) conducted 1.65 crore virtual hearings till November 30, 2021, even as video-conferencing facilities were enabled between 3,240 court complexes and corresponding 1,272 jails.
The minister was answering questions on measures adopted by the government to facilitate SC in reducing the judicial delay. He said a committee of the apex court was considering deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to reduce delays.
“A need was felt for adoption of new cutting-edge technology of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence for enhancing the efficiency of the justice delivery system. To explore the use of AI in the judicial domain, the Supreme Court has constituted an Artificial Intelligence Committee which has mainly identified application of AI technology in translation of judicial documents; legal research assistance and process automation,” Rijiju said.
He said the government was implementing the eCourts Phase-II since 2015.
Under the Wide Area Network (WAN) Project of the scheme, 2,960 courts sites have been commissioned as on February 7 this year with 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps bandwidth speed. This forms the backbone for ensuring data connectivity across India. Seven platforms have been created to provide real time information on case status, cause lists and judgements to lawyers and litigants through SMS Push and Pull with 2,00,000 SMSs sent daily and 2,50,000 emails sent daily. The multilingual eCourts services portal has 35 lakh hits daily,” the ministry said addressing concerns on justice delivery in Covid times.
