eCourts Phase III: What ₹7,210 Crore Will Build, and Where the Private Sector Steps In

eCourts Phase III is a ₹7,210 crore, four-year (FY 2023-24 to FY 2026-27) investment to digitise legacy court records, migrate to a national cloud, expand virtual courts, and integrate the criminal justice system, making India’s judicial data deeper, faster, and more connected for everyone building on top of it.

Last updated: 23 September 2026

In September 2023, the Union Cabinet cleared the third phase of the eCourts Mission Mode Project with an outlay of ₹7,210 crore over four years. That single decision is one of the largest public investments in judicial technology anywhere in the world. For context, Phase I (approved 2007, implemented through 2015) cost ₹935 crore. Phase II (2015 to 2023) cost ₹1,670 crore. Phase III is larger than Phase I and II combined, roughly 2.8x, and its scope is fundamentally different. This post breaks the money down line by line using the official component list, checks what has actually been delivered so far, and looks at where the private sector, including eCourtsIndia.com, fits into the picture.

We write this as a private aggregator that sits on top of the eCourts foundation. Our view is straightforward: Phase III is good news for every legaltech company in India, and the best way to read it is as infrastructure that gets richer every quarter, creating more raw material for the application layer to build on. If you are new to the programme itself, our plain-English explainer on the eCourts system covers the basics first.

The ₹7,210 crore, broken down

Phase III was approved by the Union Cabinet on 13 September 2023 as a four-year scheme with an outlay of ₹7,210 crore. The Press Information Bureau release that announced it lists 24 cost components. They are reproduced below in the same order, with each line’s share of the total worked out by us.

#	Component (PIB, 13 Sep 2023)	Cost estimate (₹ crore)	Share of ₹7,210 crore
1	Scanning, digitisation and digital preservation of case records	2,038.40	28.3%
2	Cloud infrastructure	1,205.23	16.7%
3	Additional hardware for existing courts	643.66	8.9%
4	Infrastructure in newly set up courts	426.25	5.9%
5	Establishment of 1,150 virtual courts	413.08	5.7%
6	4,400 fully functional eSewa Kendras	394.48	5.5%
7	Paperless courts	359.20	5.0%
8	System and application software development	243.52	3.4%
9	Solar power backup	229.50	3.2%
10	Video conferencing set-up	228.48	3.2%
11	e-Filing	215.97	3.0%
12	Connectivity (primary and redundancy)	208.72	2.9%
13	Capacity building	208.52	2.9%
14	Live audio-visual streaming (CLASS) in 300 court complexes	112.26	1.6%
15	Human resources	56.67	0.8%
16	Future technological advancements	53.57	0.7%
17	Judicial process re-engineering	33.00	0.5%
18	Disabled-friendly ICT facilities	27.54	0.4%
19	NSTEP (electronic service of summons)	25.75	0.4%
20	Online dispute resolution (ODR)	23.72	0.3%
21	Knowledge management system	23.30	0.3%
22	e-Office for High Courts and district courts	21.10	0.3%
23	Integration with the Interoperable Criminal Justice System (ICJS)	11.78	0.2%
24	S3WAAS website platform	6.35	0.1%
	Total	7,210	100%

Three things jump out. First, records and the cloud they live on dominate the plan. Scanning and digitisation (₹2,038 crore) and cloud infrastructure (₹1,205 crore) together take about 45% of the money. Second, courtroom hardware is the next big block: extra hardware for existing courts and infrastructure for new ones add up to roughly ₹1,070 crore. Third, several lines that get a lot of attention in speeches are small in rupee terms. Paperless courts are ₹359 crore (5%), capacity building is ₹208 crore (under 3%), and the court-side link to the Interoperable Criminal Justice System is just ₹11.78 crore, less than 0.2% of the outlay.

That last number surprises people, so it helps to read it correctly. ICJS itself is run from the home ministry side, and the court budget only pays for the court’s end of the connection. A small line does not mean ICJS is unimportant to courts. It means most of the heavy lifting sits in someone else’s budget.

Averaged over four years, ₹7,210 crore works out to about ₹1,800 crore a year. This year’s allocation is below that average: the Union Budget for 2026-27 gave Phase III ₹1,200 crore, which is a useful reminder that a sanctioned outlay and a year’s cash are two different things.

Set against the cost of slow courts, the bill is modest. Estimates cited in policy research put the drag of judicial delay at one to two percent of India’s GDP every year, and we work through what that means in the $70 billion drag of judicial delay.

What changes from Phase II to Phase III

Phase II was about coverage. It ran from 2015 to 2023 on an outlay of ₹1,670 crore, of which ₹1,668.43 crore was spent, and by the time it closed 18,735 district and subordinate courts had been computerised. The Case Information System ran in those courts, the National Judicial Data Grid was aggregating daily case metadata, and case status from district courts and High Courts was open on the public portal. We tell that story in detail in Inside eCourts: How India Digitised 18,000+ Courts. The job of Phase II, in one sentence, was to get every court into one system. It succeeded.

Phase III is about depth and speed. Four shifts matter.

1. Legacy digitisation moves from pilot to scale. Scanning, digitisation and digital preservation is the largest single line at ₹2,038 crore, 28% of the outlay. The Phase III plan speaks of digitising 3,108 crore pages of legacy records. This is the most under-appreciated line in the plan, because every older order that becomes readable text is an order that search can finally reach.
2. Cloud replaces distributed servers. Cloud infrastructure is the second-largest line at ₹1,205 crore. The government told Parliament in March 2026 that all eCourts portals are now hosted on the National Informatics Centre’s cloud, and district court websites have moved to the S3WAAS platform. A single hosting layer makes the public portals steadier, which matters to everyone who reads from them.
3. ICJS turns courts into one node in a five-node graph. Courts get wired into police, prisons, prosecution, and forensics, so a criminal matter can carry its history across agencies instead of starting again at each desk. The court-side budget line is small, as noted above, but the effect on data is large. On our side, the same idea already shows up in Crime Reports, where 12 lakh+ FIR PDFs from 13 states and union territories can be searched next to the court cases they lead to.
4. Virtual courts graduate from experiment to default for specific matter types. The plan funds 1,150 virtual courts (₹413 crore) and a video conferencing set-up (₹228 crore), and it explicitly aims to take online adjudication beyond traffic challans. Courts had held more than 3.97 crore hearings by video conference by March 2026. Every matter decided on virtual rails produces clean, structured data from day one.

The private sector lens

Public infrastructure spending creates private opportunity in two classic ways. First, the infrastructure itself needs vendors, and large parts of Phase III will be executed through tenders for scanning, OCR, cloud, video conferencing, and CMS builds. Those are government contracts, not venture opportunities, and they typically go to system integrators like TCS, Wipro, L&T Infotech, and specialist scanning vendors. Useful work, not our focus.

Second, and more interesting for legaltech, the infrastructure produces a steadily richer public data asset that private builders can layer on top of. Every year of Phase III, a greater share of India’s judicial record is machine-readable, cross-linked, and available in close to real time. The value chain that sits above this raw data, including aggregation, research, workflow, AI, and analytics, is where private companies operate. We covered the full stack in our layer-stack post.

The practical implication is that the application layer benefits the most from Phase III without doing any of the heavy lifting. Historical digitisation means older orders and judgments become searchable for the first time. Cloud consolidation means the public portals get steadier. ICJS integration means criminal matter data gets richer. For a sense of what that looks like once it reaches a developer, see our piece on why Indian court data is finally a dataset, not a document. None of this is free to consume, and none of it comes in an investor-ready format, but all of it flows downhill into the aggregation layer.

What Phase III does not solve

Respecting the scale of the project, three gaps remain that the private sector should not expect the government to close.

• Workflow for professionals. eCourts Services is built for citizen access and judicial administration, not for a litigation associate managing 300 matters across 12 states. That product lives in the application layer.
• Cross-jurisdiction reasoning. The public portal shows you a case. It does not tell you how similar cases have trended, which judges decide which way, or which clauses survive appeal. That is the analytics and research layer.
• Programmatic access at scale. Phase III will produce richer APIs, but the intent is administrative integration, not product-grade developer endpoints with SDKs, rate limits, webhooks, and commercial SLAs. That is the aggregation layer.

Each of these gaps is where private builders have earned their seat at the table. The way to think about it is the same way you think about UPI and banking apps. NPCI runs the rails. PhonePe, Google Pay, and Paytm run the experience. Neither side displaces the other.

What Phase III has delivered so far

The first version of this post listed “likely milestones”. It is more useful now to look at what has actually been reported. The figures below come from the government’s replies in Parliament and the Union Budget.

Measure	Reported position	Source
Pages of court records digitised	660 crore+ pages	Rajya Sabha reply, March 2026
eSewa Kendras set up	2,444 (target 4,400)	Rajya Sabha reply, March 2026
Hearings held by video conference	3.97 crore+	Rajya Sabha reply, March 2026
Cases filed through eFiling	1.07 crore+	Rajya Sabha reply, March 2026
High Courts live streaming proceedings	11	Rajya Sabha reply, March 2026
Hosting of eCourts portals	All on NIC cloud; district sites on S3WAAS	Rajya Sabha reply, March 2026
Case Information System	Upgraded to CIS 4.0	Rajya Sabha reply, March 2026
Union Budget allocation, 2026-27	₹1,200 crore	Union Budget 2026-27

Two cautions. The 660 crore pages figure counts all digitisation under the project, current and legacy, so it is not a straight percentage of the 3,108 crore legacy-page target. And eSewa Kendras at 2,444 against a target of 4,400 shows that the citizen-facing rollout still has ground to cover in the final year.

Dates slip, scopes shift, and government schedules are elastic. The direction is what matters. When the four-year window closes, India’s judicial data asset will be larger, deeper, and more connected than it was in 2023.

What this means for eCourtsIndia

We built eCourtsIndia.com on top of the eCourts foundation precisely because the foundation keeps getting better. Every additional layer of digitisation, every new API, every schema improvement flows through into richer data for our users. Today we index 32 crore+ case records across the Supreme Court, all 25 High Courts, district and taluka courts in all 36 states and union territories, and 18 tribunal and commission types, along with 125 crore+ orders and judgments and a directory of 34 lakh+ advocates. As Phase III matures, that coverage gets deeper on the legacy side and faster on the current side.

The way we think about our role is as a complement to what the government is building. We take the public stack, add the product polish that professional and enterprise users need, and make the data accessible through a modern API and our eCourts MCP for AI applications. We also fill gaps the public stack leaves open. Tribunals such as the NCLT and ITAT do not issue CNRs, so our tribunal CNR generator mints a 16-character CNR for 14 tribunals (the method is explained in our tribunal CNR spec). And IndiaCode by eCourtsIndia puts the statute book next to the cases that interpret it. The more Phase III succeeds, the more useful our layer becomes.

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If you are an investor, policy researcher, or builder tracking how India’s judicial data infrastructure evolves, eCourtsIndia.com is a good place to start. You can explore district court coverage, High Court orders, and structured advocate data across the country. Developers can build on our REST API or use our eCourts MCP for direct AI agent integration.

Related reading

• Inside eCourts: How India Digitised India’s Courts
• Mapping India’s Court Data Stack
• Three Legaltech Whitespace Plays for 2026-27
• The $793 Million Question

Sources

• Department of Justice, Ministry of Law and Justice, eCourts Project Phase III approval documents (2023)
• Law Ministry written reply in the Rajya Sabha on e-Courts progress, 11 March 2026 (as reported by ANI)
• Union Budget 2026-27, Demand for Grants of the Ministry of Law and Justice (eCourts Phase III allocation of ₹1,200 crore)
• Press Information Bureau, Cabinet approves eCourts Phase III for 4 years, 13 September 2023 (component-wise cost table)
• Press Information Bureau, Phase II of the e-Courts Mission Mode Project (18,735 courts computerised; 3,108 crore legacy pages)
• National Judicial Data Grid public dashboard, njdg.ecourts.gov.in
• eCourts Services Portal, ecourts.gov.in
• eCourtsIndia.com coverage dataset, September 2026

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