The Complete eCourtsIndia Search Guide: Filters, Codes & Power-User Techniques

The eCourtsIndia search bar is a full-text search engine, powered by Apache Solr (an open-source search platform), that indexes 27 crore+ (270 million+) case records and growing, spanning the Supreme Court, 25 High Courts, district courts and tribunals across India. Master the structured filters, 137 case-type codes and 71 status codes, and you can pinpoint any matter in seconds. This guide walks through every filter, code and power-user technique the live system supports, all verified against ecourtsindia.com/search.

What Does the eCourtsIndia Search Bar Actually Search?

The search engine behind eCourtsIndia.com/search is Apache Solr. When you type a free-text query, it does not just match case titles. Every query runs against a unified searchable_text field that aggregates content from more than 40 source fields, including:

• CNR (Case Number Record), filing number, and registration number: exact-match identifiers. The CNR is the unique 16-character code that identifies a case across India’s eCourts system.
• Petitioners, respondents, and litigants: party-name search with a special text_name analyzer that splits on whitespace and tolerates punctuation in initials like S.N. Aggarwal.
• Petitioner and respondent advocates: partial match works (Sharma finds every advocate named Sharma).
• Judges: presiding officer names across every tier.
• Acts and sections, case type, case status, court code, bench type, and judicial section: structured identifiers.
• AI keywords, AI summary text, and the full Markdown text of every uploaded order: yes, your query also reads inside the court orders we index.

The practical implication: a query like specific performance matches cases where those words appear in party names, acts, AI keywords, or anywhere inside an uploaded order, even though order text isn’t displayed in the result card. Your search is always more comprehensive than the results list suggests.

High Court and District Court case pages now also surface a richer field set: for High Courts, e-filing number and date, filing type, litigant type, case-type conversion and structured petitioner/respondent details; for District Courts, process, interim-application, transfer and hearing-history details. Note these newer fields are shown on the case page for reference, they are not yet separate search filters, so the search bar still matches on the long-standing core fields listed above.

How Does the Keyword Search Read Your Query?

Unlike some legal databases, eCourtsIndia doesn’t ask you to learn a boolean query language. The search box is a plain keyword and full-text search, so you describe the case in ordinary words and let the engine do the ranking. A few things worth knowing about how it behaves:

• Just type the words. murder weapon finds records that contain those terms across the case record and order text, and ranks the closest matches first. You don’t add AND between words, and you don’t need quotes, asterisks or parentheses, the box reads your text as keywords, not as a boolean expression.
• It searches everything at once. One query runs against party names, advocates, judges, acts and sections, AI keywords and the full text of uploaded orders simultaneously, which is why a term can surface a case even when it only appears deep inside an order.
• It tolerates variation. The engine is case-insensitive and handles common synonyms and word forms, so Section 138 and cheque bounce, or tenant and lessee, tend to pull overlapping results without special syntax.
• A CNR jumps straight through. Paste a full 16-character CNR into the bar and you land directly on the case page, the fastest lookup of all.
• Narrow with filters, not operators. To tighten a broad query, add a party or advocate name, or apply the structured sidebar filters (case type, status, court, bench, dates). That’s how you get precision here, rather than by stacking operators.

How Do You Filter by Party, Advocate, and Judge?

Click Advanced field-specific search below the search bar. It opens four dedicated fields, Judge, Advocate, Petitioner and Respondent, that let you target one party type rather than searching across everything at once:

• Petitioner / Appellant: the party who filed.
• Respondent / Defendant: the opposing party. For government parties, try variations: State of Maharashtra, Union of India, Municipal Corporation. (Not sure which side your party is on? Just type the name in the main search bar, which reads both sides at once.)
• Advocate: unique to eCourtsIndia. A search for a senior advocate’s name returns their reported matters across courts, and partial matching works, so Mehta finds every advocate with Mehta in their name.
• Judge: equivalent to IndianKanoon’s author: or bench: prefixes. Try Justice Chandrachud or a last name like Kaul.
• How names are matched: the name fields support several match modes — all (every word must appear), any (any word can match), phrase (words in the given order) and fuzzy (tolerates spelling and transliteration variants) — which is why a slightly misspelt advocate or judge name can still surface the right person.

How Do You Search by Acts and Sections?

Acts and sections are searched as free text in the main bar, type the reference directly and the engine matches it anywhere it appears in a case record:

• Type it the way you’d say it: IPC 302, CPC Order 7 Rule 11, or RERA Section 18 all work. The search is case-insensitive and forgiving of format variation.
• Both abbreviations and full names match: because it’s full-text, IPC 302 and Indian Penal Code 302 generally surface the same matters, so use whichever you remember.
• Pair it with a filter for precision: combine the act in the search bar with a case-type, court or status filter from the sidebar to cut a broad statutory search down to the courts and outcomes you care about.

What Are the Most Useful Case-Type Codes?

Out of 137 codes in the live enum, these are the ones day-to-day practice relies on. Combine them with status and date filters for sharp queries.

• Civil: CS Civil Suit, COM_S Commercial Suit, RFA Regular First Appeal, RSA Regular Second Appeal, CRP Civil Revision Petition, EA Execution Application, RC Rent Control, LC Land Acquisition.
• Criminal: BA Bail, ABA Anticipatory Bail, CRL_A Criminal Appeal, SC Sessions Case, CC Criminal Complaint, CR_REV Criminal Revision, NDPS, SC_ST, DREF Death Reference.
• Writ & PIL: WP_C Writ Petition (Civil), WP_CRL Writ Petition (Criminal), HCP Habeas Corpus, PIL, CONMT Contempt.
• Supreme Court: SLP_C, SLP_CRL, CA Civil Appeal, TP_C Transfer Petition, RP_C Review Petition, CURP Curative.
• Corporate / IBC / Tribunal: COP Company Petition, IP Insolvency Petition, CP_IBC, IA_IBC, CAPP_AT NCLAT Appeal, ITA Income Tax Appeal, MACA MACT Appeal, RERA, ARB_PET Arbitration.
• Family & Misc.: DV Domestic Violence, MCOC Maintenance, GP Guardianship, PP Probate, EP Election Petition, FEMA.

This list is a snapshot. The authoritative, always-current set of case-type codes (along with court codes, statuses and benches) lives in the live enums, which you can browse via the API docs (or fetch programmatically from https://webapi.ecourtsindia.com/api/partner/enums). Coverage keeps expanding: support for the GST Appellate Tribunal (GSTAT) is rolling out, with its case-type codes (AA_GSTAT, CA_GSTAT, RA_GSTAT, WA_GSTAT and more) being added to the case-type picker.

Tip: comma-separate codes to union them. WP_C,WP_CRL returns both civil and criminal writs in one query. Or click multiple Case Type checkboxes in the sidebar.

How Do the 71 Status Codes Actually Work in Practice?

Status is a fast way to separate live matters from closed ones. The critical codes:

• Active / Pending: PENDING, ADMITTED, ARGUMENTS, PART_HEARD, HEARING, EVIDENCE, TRIAL, NOTICE_ISSUED, FOR_ADMISSION, FOR_JUDGMENT, FOR_ORDERS.
• Disposed / Final: DISPOSED, DISMISSED, ALLOWED, PARTLY_ALLOWED, DECREED, WITHDRAWN, COMPROMISE, TRANSFERRED, REMANDED, CLOSED.
• Specialised: LOK_ADALAT, MEDIATION, STAYED, DEFECTIVE, INFRUCTUOUS.

Verified caveat: BAIL_GRANTED and BAIL_REJECTED exist in the enum but are not uniformly populated. Many High Courts simply record disposed bail applications as DISPOSED. For Delhi HC, a filter of BA + BAIL_GRANTED can return zero rows, because the tag isn’t used there. To reliably find granted bail orders, search BA + DISPOSED + Has Judgments = Yes and skim the judgment text.

How Do You Filter by Court Code Without Getting Zero Results?

Court codes are where searches most often go silently wrong. Two rules:

• High Court codes always carry a bench suffix. Use DLHC01, never DLHC. Bombay HC alone has five (HCBM01 Appellate Side, HCBM02 Original Side, HCBM03 Aurangabad, HCBM04 Nagpur, HCBM05 Goa). Karnataka has three (KAHC01 Bengaluru, KAHC02 Dharwad, KAHC03 Kalaburagi). Calcutta has four (WBCHCA Appellate Side, WBCHCO Original Side, WBCHCJ, WBCHCP). The Supreme Court is SCIN01.
• NCLT codes always end in a trailing 0. Among the 15 NCLT benches we index (NCLT officially has 16), examples include NCLTDL0, NCLTMB0, NCLTCH0, NCLTKL0, NCLTAH0, NCLTHD0, NCLTBG0, NCLTJP0, NCLTAR0, NCLTIN0, NCLTCG0, NCLTKC0, NCLTCT0 and NCLTGW0. Drop the 0 and the query silently returns nothing.
• Newer tribunal benches are being added. GST Appellate Tribunal (GSTAT) bench court-codes are rolling out into the court-code picker, so GSTAT benches are progressively becoming filterable alongside the established tribunals.

For District Courts, use the state-level cause-list path (e.g. /causelist/DL) and drill down through the sidebar facets rather than typing codes by hand. (A cause list is the daily court schedule of cases listed for hearing.)

For developers: to check listings in bulk, POST /api/partner/causelist/cnr/batch takes 1 to 100 CNRs in a single call (body { "cnrs": [ ... ] }; a single case is just a one-element array) and answers, for each CNR, whether it is listed for an upcoming hearing and what it is listed for. There is no single-CNR GET endpoint; billing is ₹0.30 per CNR on pay-as-you-go or ₹0.10 on subscription.

Which Date Filters Does eCourtsIndia Offer?

Three independent date filters, each a year-range slider in the filter sidebar:

• Filing Date: when the case was originally filed.
• Registration Date: when it was formally registered.
• Decision Date: final order or judgment.

Everyday uses: old pending writs (drag the Filing Date slider to end around 2014 and add PENDING), or judgments delivered in a given year (set the Decision Date range to, say, 2025). Each slider is a from/to year range, so you can bracket a window as wide or as narrow as you need.

How Do Bench Type and CNR Search Work?

A few smaller but high-leverage controls round out a power search:

• Bench type: SB Single Bench, DB Division Bench, FB Full Bench, LB Larger Bench, CB Constitution Bench, plus PB Principal Bench and RB Regional Bench. Filtering on CB or FB isolates the highest-precedential-value decisions.
• Relevance ranking: results are ordered by how well each case matches your query by default, so the most relevant matters surface first without you choosing a sort option.
• CNR direct lookup: a complete 16-character CNR (Case Number Record), e.g. DLHC010123452024 (16 alphanumeric characters with no spaces or hyphens), typed into the main bar jumps straight to the case page. This is the fastest possible search.
• Extra filters worth knowing: Has Judgments and Has Orders (narrow to cases that actually carry a written judgment or order, ideal for case-law research and skipping interlocutory noise), plus the Case Category groupings (CIVIL, CRIMINAL, WRIT, APPEAL, REVISION, BAIL, ARBITRATION, COMMERCIAL, EXECUTION, FAMILY, LAND, MISC, PIL, SERVICE) for a quick high-level cut, and a Court Level facet (Supreme Court, High Court, District Court, Tribunal) when you want to scope by tier rather than by a specific court code.

Under the hood, search returns up to 100 results per page, paged with a 1-based page number, and orders by relevance by default; you can instead sort on a structured field, which falls back to relevance where that field is empty. For very large result sets, cursor-based paging keeps deep navigation stable.

What Do Power-User Searches Look Like?

Five recipes you can run against the live index:

1. Pending bail in Delhi HC: Case Type BA + Court DLHC01 + Status PENDING.
2. IPC 302 Division Bench judgments from 2025: Query IPC 302 + Bench DB + Decision Year 2025 + Has Judgments Yes.
3. Mumbai NCLT insolvency tracker: Case Type IP + Court NCLTMB0 + Status PENDING.
4. Constitution Bench fundamental-rights decisions: Query fundamental rights + Bench CB + Has Judgments Yes.
5. Old pending writs before 2015: Case Type WP_C + Filing Date range ending around 2014 + Status PENDING.

Found a matter you need to follow? There aren’t saved-search alerts, but you can monitor a specific case: open it, add it to a client in your dashboard, and switch on Email + WhatsApp updates. You’ll then get a near-real-time alert whenever a new order, hearing date or status change lands (it’s opt-in, needs a verified mobile, and is credit-metered; NCLT/NCLAT cases aren’t trackable). Your case-tracking setup guide walks through it, and your recent searches are remembered in your browser so you can re-run them quickly.

What Are the Common Mistakes to Avoid?

• Expecting boolean operators or special syntax. The search box reads natural keywords, not AND/OR/NOT expressions, quotes or wildcards, so just describe the case in plain words and lean on the sidebar filters to narrow it.
• Hunting for an exact statutory format. Acts and sections are free-text, so IPC 302 works just as well as the full name, no need to match a stored string exactly.
• Using High Court codes without the bench suffix (DLHC instead of DLHC01), a silent zero-result failure.
• Dropping the trailing 0 on NCLT codes (NCLTDL instead of NCLTDL0), the same silent failure.
• Relying only on BAIL_GRANTED/BAIL_REJECTED status, which is inconsistently populated; use DISPOSED + judgment-text review instead.

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Related reading on eCourtsIndia Blogs: Check Your Court Case Status Online • What Is a CNR Number • Check Any High Court Case Status. Figures (such as the total case count) are accurate as of mid-2026 and the index refreshes continuously. Published by the eCourtsIndia Data Team. General information, not legal advice.

Frequently Asked Questions