You can download most Indian court orders and judgments free from official portals. District court and High Court orders are on the eCourts Services portal (services.ecourts.gov.in), searchable by CNR or case number. Supreme Court judgments are on sci.gov.in. eCourtsIndia, a private platform, puts these courts in one search. For filing or evidence, apply for a certified copy.
On eCourtsIndia.com you can get orders and judgments of the Supreme Court, all 25 High Courts, district and taluka courts in all 36 states and Union Territories that publish on the eCourts network, and 18 tribunal types, without visiting the court: find the case, open the order and click Download True Copy. Finding the case and seeing its full list of orders is free. Each order download costs ₹2 in credits, and every account gets 50 free credits a month (as of September 2026).
eCourtsIndia indexes 125 crore+ orders and judgments, searchable by CNR, party name or advocate, and by the text of orders that have a text layer. The download is the court’s published PDF, not a certified copy. eCourtsIndia is a private platform, not the Government’s eCourts portal (ecourts.gov.in).
Last updated: 28 September 2026. First published 16 April 2026.
Key takeaways
- Orders are free to view and download on the official portals: eCourts Services for district courts and High Courts, and sci.gov.in for the Supreme Court.
- Search the case by CNR, party name or advocate on eCourtsIndia, open View Orders, then open the order you need. Searching is free.
- Download True Copy costs ₹2 per order and an AI Summary also costs ₹2. Both come from credits: 50 free a month, and unused credits carry forward (as of September 2026). The download is not a certified copy.
- eCourtsIndia indexes 125 crore+ orders and judgments across the Supreme Court, all 25 High Courts, district and taluka courts, and 18 tribunal and commission types.
- For filing in another case or producing as evidence, get a certified copy from the court’s own copying section.
- Turn on WhatsApp and email alerts for a case and eCourtsIndia will tell you when it picks up a new order or hearing date.
Where are court orders published officially?
Every court publishes its own orders, and the official copies are free to read online. Start here:
- District and taluka courts: the eCourts Services portal (services.ecourts.gov.in) and the eCourts Services app. The portal is run by the e-Committee of the Supreme Court of India and maintained by the National Informatics Centre (NIC). Search by CNR, case number, party name or advocate, or use the portal’s Court Orders search.
- High Courts: the High Court services on the same portal, or the High Court’s own website. The e-Committee’s free Judgment Search portal (judgments.ecourts.gov.in) searches Supreme Court and High Court judgments by keyword or phrase.
- Supreme Court of India: daily orders and judgments on sci.gov.in. Reported judgments are in the free Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) at scr.sci.gov.in.
- Tribunals and commissions: each tribunal’s own website. eCourtsIndia also brings 18 tribunal and commission types into one search (see below).
The same matter’s orders are often split across two of these places. Our explainer on what the eCourts system is maps these surfaces; eCourtsIndia puts them behind one search. The fourth source is the court’s copying section. It issues certified copies, which is what you file.
How do you download a court order free from the official eCourts portal?
- Open the eCourts Services portal at services.ecourts.gov.in. For a High Court case, choose High Courts from the top menu.
- Enter the 16-character CNR without hyphens or spaces. No CNR? Click Case Status and search by case registration number, party name or advocate name.
- Type the captcha characters and click Search.
- Open the case to see its current status and history, and find the order or judgment you need.
- Click the order to open the PDF, then save it.
This route is free, but it works one court and one captcha at a time. That is where a cross-court search saves time.
How do you download a court order on eCourtsIndia using a CNR number?
- Open ecourtsindia.com/search, or type ecourtsindia.com/cnr/ followed by the CNR in your browser.
- Enter your 16-character CNR number (Case Number Record), printed on your court papers, with no hyphens or spaces. The official portal’s own example is MHAU019999992015.
- On the case page, click View Orders, or scroll the Case History with Orders timeline. Each hearing that produced an order has a link showing the order number, date and type, for example “Order(12), 10 Mar 2026, Interim Order” (an illustrative example).
- Open the order. Its page shows the court, judge, order date and purpose, and a list of every other order in the case.
- Click Download True Copy to save the PDF (₹2), or Get AI Summary for a quick read (₹2). Use Share This Order to send the order page to a colleague or client. The PDF is the order as the court published it, not a certified copy.
Don’t have the CNR? Search by party name or advocate instead, then narrow by court, year or case type. If you remember a phrase from the order but not the parties, type it in quotes. Search covers the text of orders that have a text layer. Scanned orders without text may not show up, so also try the party name or CNR. The eCourtsIndia Search Guide explains phrase, boolean and filter queries.
Which courts’ orders can you get on eCourtsIndia?
The eCourtsIndia order archive spans every tier of the Indian judiciary that publishes on the eCourts network:
- District and taluka courts in all 36 states and Union Territories that publish on the eCourts network. This includes civil, criminal and family courts and, where the state has put them on eCourts, labour courts and motor accident claims tribunals.
- All 25 High Courts and their benches, for example the Bombay High Court’s principal seat plus its Nagpur and Aurangabad benches. See High Court case status for all 25 courts.
- Supreme Court of India: orders and judgments on the same search bar. See how to check Supreme Court case status.
- 18 tribunal and commission types, including NCLT, NCLAT, ITAT, CESTAT, DRT, DRAT, NGT, SAT, GSTAT and consumer commissions. See our guides to NCLT and NCLAT orders, consumer commission orders and CCI, SEBI and GST AAAR orders.
How much does it cost?
| Action | Cost |
|---|---|
| Official portals (eCourts Services, High Court sites, sci.gov.in): view and download orders | Free |
| eCourtsIndia: search cases, open the case page, see the list of orders | Free |
| eCourtsIndia: Download True Copy of an order (not a certified copy) | ₹2 per order |
| eCourtsIndia: AI Summary of an order | ₹2 per order |
| eCourtsIndia: track a case | ₹5 per case per month |
| eCourtsIndia: WhatsApp or email alert | ₹0.50 per alert per channel |
The 50 free credits each month cover up to 25 order downloads at ₹2 each. A long-running case can have more orders than that, so download the older ones free from the official portal, or add credits. Chambers that pull hundreds of orders a month usually move to a paid plan: ₹250 + 18% GST a month for 500 credits, ₹5,000 + 18% GST for six months (7,500 credits) or ₹10,000 + 18% GST a year (20,000 credits), as of September 2026.
How do you get every order in a case?
The order page lists every order and judgment in the matter under Case History of Orders, and each one has its own page and its own Download True Copy button. Work down the list to save them one by one. For advocates compiling a paper-book, this is the cleanest way to assemble the full record; for clients, it is an easy way to archive each order as it is passed. Developers can do the same in bulk through the API (see below).
What format are downloaded court orders in?
Every download is a PDF built from the court’s own upload. What is inside depends on the court and the year:
- Typed orders generated from the court’s case system, which are clean and text-searchable.
- Scanned orders: an image of the paper order signed in court. Older orders and many district-court orders still arrive this way.
- Order sheets: the running record many district courts keep, with the date, what happened and the next date. Our case status dictionary explains what each case status means.
If an order page shows no text, use Request Text to ask for the full text of that order.
Is a downloaded court order legally valid?
A downloaded order is good for reading, research, client briefings and planning your next step. It is not a certified copy. When an order has to be filed in another proceeding, challenged in appeal or produced as evidence, courts expect a certified copy issued by the court.
Under Section 75 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, the public officer who holds a public document gives a copy on payment of the legal fees, with a certificate at the foot that it is a true copy. The officer dates and signs the certificate with name and official title, and seals it where the officer is authorised to use a seal. Only such a copy is a certified copy. Two kinds of document exist side by side:
- Online copy. The PDF the court published, either downloaded free from the court’s own portal or through eCourtsIndia. Use it to read, research and plan. eCourtsIndia’s download button is labelled “Download True Copy”. It gives you the order PDF as the court published it. It is not a certified copy.
- Certified copy. Issued by the court’s copying section on application. The officer certifies it as a true copy, dates and signs it, and seals it. This is what you file or produce as proof.
| Online copy | Certified copy | |
|---|---|---|
| Who issues it | The court publishes the PDF online; you download it from the official portal or eCourtsIndia | The court’s copying section, on application |
| Certified, dated, signed and sealed by the court officer? | No | Yes |
| Use it for | Reading, research, client briefings, planning | Filing in another case, appeals, evidence |
Rule of thumb: if you only need to read, research or share the order, the online copy is enough. If it will be filed in court or produced as proof, apply for a certified copy. Rules differ by court, so check with the court registry or your advocate.
How do you get a certified copy of a court order?
Apply to the copying section of the court that passed the order. Give the case number, the names of the parties and the date of the order, and pay the fee the court charges. The court gives you a copy certified as a true copy, dated, signed and sealed.
Some courts also take applications online. The Hon’ble Supreme Court’s website, for example, lists an online Certified Copy service under e-Services. Check the website of the court that passed your order. Fees, forms and waiting times vary by court, so ask the registry or your advocate.
Can you download Supreme Court judgments too?
Yes, free from the Court’s own website, sci.gov.in, which remains the canonical source. Its judgments page searches by diary number, case number, judge, judgment date or free text, and daily orders sit on a separate page. For citations, Supreme Court judgments are published free in the official Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR), searchable by SCR citation or neutral citation. Private law reports add their own citations.
On eCourtsIndia, Supreme Court judgments and daily orders sit alongside district and High Court material in the same search. Search by CNR (Supreme Court CNRs start with SCIN01), diary number or party name, then filter to the Supreme Court.
How do advocates stay on top of orders across a client’s cases?
An advocate with dozens or hundreds of active matters cannot open every case every day. The eCourtsIndia client workspace is built for that:
- Organise by client: search by CNR or party name, open the case, and add it to the client.
- Switch on alerts: when eCourtsIndia picks up a new order or a change in hearing date or status, a WhatsApp and email update goes out. Tracking costs ₹5 per case per month and each alert ₹0.50 per channel (as of September 2026). Our guide shows how to enable case alerts step by step.
- Act on the alert: open the case, open the new order, download it, or run an AI Summary to decide whether it needs attention today.
- On your phone: the same flow works in the Android app and iOS app, handy when an order lands while you are in court.
- Automate it: the eCourtsIndia API (23 endpoints and ₹200 of free credits on signup, as of September 2026) and the hosted MCP server can pull order PDFs and order text straight into a practice-management system or document vault. See how to pull order PDFs through the API.
How far back does the order archive go?
It depends on when each court started uploading orders under the eCourts project, and that varies by state, district and High Court. Some case pages carry orders going back many years; others begin only when the court moved to online uploads, and some older hearings show no order at all. If the order you need is not on the case page, the court’s copying section can still issue a certified copy from its records. If the whole case is missing on eCourtsIndia, submit its CNR through Add a Missing Case and eCourtsIndia will try to fetch it.
Search court orders across courts in one place. 125 crore+ orders and judgments on eCourtsIndia, searchable by CNR, party, advocate or order text. Search is free; downloads are ₹2 (September 2026).
A practical download workflow
Downloading an order looks trivial until you try it for twenty matters across ten courts in one afternoon. The pop-ups. The scanned PDFs rotated sideways. The order that is on the cause list but not yet on the portal (see how to read the day’s cause list). The captcha that comes back every few downloads. A five-minute job stretches into an hour.
Orders are the output of the whole court machinery and the raw material for everything that follows: the next reply, the precedent you cite, the client briefing, the appeal. A team with clean access to every order in its matter list works at speed. A team that has to chase each download is always a step behind.
Build a habit. The day after every hearing, open the case and download the latest order. Name files consistently, for example court, case number, order date and type: DLHC_WPC-1234-2024_2026-04-18_interim.pdf. File them by matter. Within a month you will have a private archive you can search in seconds. Within a year it becomes a research asset for your own drafting, and a starting point for empirical research on court orders.
Larger chambers automate this: a background job watches for new orders and drops each PDF into the matter folder, so the lawyer finds it waiting in the morning. With alerts switched on, eCourtsIndia tells you when it picks up something new to fetch.
Reading orders faster
Once downloads are reliable, reading becomes the bottleneck. Interim orders are usually one to three pages; final orders run longer, and reserved judgments can run to a hundred pages or more. Read the first page, the operative paragraph (the part that says what the court ordered) and the last page carefully, then scan the middle. That gives you the skeleton of the reasoning, and you can return for depth when you need to cite it.
The AI Summary button on each order page (₹2) does the first pass for you: what the order says, who it favours and what happens next, so you can decide whether it needs a full read today. AI summaries can contain errors. Read the order itself before relying on it. The AI Clerk post explains how summaries and case watching work together. When an order turns on a statute, open the section on IndiaCode by eCourtsIndia to read the bare text alongside the judgments that cite it; our IndiaCode guide shows how.
Edge cases that save or cost time
Two are worth remembering. First, some orders are uploaded as scanned images with no text layer, so they cannot be text-searched until someone runs OCR; if you keep a local archive, a simple OCR step makes later research far faster. Second, some older uploads carry the wrong case-type label, so a text search finds them but browsing by case type does not. When in doubt, search by CNR or party name rather than case type alone. For how CNRs keep matters traceable, see CNR Number Decoded, and for the day-to-day lookup, how to check your court case status online.
Published by the eCourtsIndia Data Team. General information, not legal advice. Spotted an error? Write to support@ecourtsindia.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I download a court order online in India?
For district courts and High Courts, open the official eCourts Services portal (services.ecourts.gov.in), search by CNR or case number, enter the captcha and open the order PDF from the case history. This is free. Supreme Court orders and judgments are on sci.gov.in. On eCourtsIndia you search once across courts, open the case, click View Orders and download the order for ₹2 (as of September 2026).
Is a downloaded court order legally valid?
A downloaded order is good for reading, research and planning your next step. It is not a certified copy. Under Section 75 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, a certified copy is one the officer holding the record certifies as a true copy, dates, signs and seals where authorised. To file an order in another case, attach it to an appeal or produce it as evidence, apply to the court’s copying section. For the everyday lookup, see how to check case status online.
Is it free to download court orders?
Yes, on the official portals. The eCourts Services portal, High Court websites and sci.gov.in let anyone view and download orders without a fee. On eCourtsIndia, searching and seeing the list of orders is free, and each download or AI summary costs ₹2 from credits. Every account gets 50 free credits a month, enough for 25 downloads. Prices are as of September 2026; see the pricing page.
Which courts’ orders can I get on eCourtsIndia?
As of September 2026, eCourtsIndia covers the Supreme Court of India, all 25 High Courts and their benches, district and taluka courts in all 36 states and Union Territories that publish on the eCourts network, and 18 tribunal and commission types such as NCLT, ITAT, CESTAT, DRT and consumer commissions. It indexes 125 crore+ orders and judgments, all reachable from one search bar. If a court never uploaded an order, no online source will have it.
Can I get every order in a case?
Yes. On eCourtsIndia each order page lists every order and judgment in the case under Case History of Orders, and each has its own Download True Copy button (₹2, not a certified copy), so you can save them one by one. Switch on WhatsApp and email alerts to hear when eCourtsIndia picks up a new order, and developers can pull order PDFs in bulk through the eCourtsIndia API.
How far back does the order archive go?
It varies by court. Each court began uploading orders at a different point under the eCourts project, so some cases carry many years of orders and others start only when the court went online. If an order is not online, the court’s copying section can still issue a certified copy from its records. If a whole case is missing on eCourtsIndia, submit its CNR through Add a Missing Case. Our explainer on the eCourts system gives the background.
How do I download Supreme Court judgments?
Search the Supreme Court’s website, sci.gov.in, by diary number, case number, judge, judgment date or free text. Daily orders sit on a separate page. The Supreme Court Reports portal (scr.sci.gov.in) searches reported judgments by SCR or neutral citation, and the e-Committee’s Judgment Search portal (judgments.ecourts.gov.in) covers Supreme Court and High Court judgments. All are free. On eCourtsIndia, Supreme Court CNRs start with SCIN01.
Is eCourtsIndia the official eCourts website?
No. eCourtsIndia is a private legal-technology platform. It is not affiliated with, associated with, or endorsed by the Government of India, the Supreme Court of India or its e-Committee, or any court. The official eCourts Services portal (services.ecourts.gov.in) is run by the e-Committee of the Supreme Court of India and maintained by the National Informatics Centre. Always verify details against official court records or certified copies.
Sources
- e-Committee, Supreme Court of India: eCourts Services portal (search by CNR, case status, court orders; designed, hosted and maintained by NIC). Checked 28 September 2026.
- e-Committee, Supreme Court of India: Judgment Search portal (judgments and orders of the Supreme Court and High Courts). Checked 28 September 2026.
- Supreme Court of India: Judgments search (diary number, case number, judge, judgment date, free text), with Daily Orders and the Certified Copy service listed under e-Services. Checked 28 September 2026.
- Supreme Court of India: Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR), search by SCR or neutral citation. Checked 28 September 2026.
- Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, Section 75 (certified copies of public documents), on IndiaCode by eCourtsIndia. IndiaCode by eCourtsIndia is a private structured republication; the Gazette and competent issuing authority remain authoritative. Checked 28 September 2026.
- eCourtsIndia: Pricing (plans, per-action prices, alerts per channel). Checked 28 September 2026.