If you have ever searched for a court case in India online, you have used the eCourts portal, whether you realised it or not. Every private platform that shows you case status, cause lists, or order copies draws from the same public source: ecourts.gov.in and the National Judicial Data Grid.
eCourts is the largest piece of public legal data infrastructure in the country. It has computerised more than 18,000 district and subordinate courts across 37 states and union territories, brought over 22 crore case records into a unified system, and made the judicial process legible to citizens for the first time in Indian history. It deserves to be understood, not taken for granted.
This post is our primer on what eCourts is, what Phase III will fund, and where private platforms like eCourtsIndia fit on top of it.
What is the eCourts project?
eCourts is the short name for the eCourts Integrated Mission Mode Project, a Government of India programme run by the Department of Justice under the Ministry of Law and Justice, in partnership with the eCommittee of the Supreme Court of India. The Cabinet approved it in 2007 with a mandate that still reads like a blueprint: computerise every court in the country, bring them onto a common platform, and make case data available to citizens.
Seventeen years later, it has done exactly that, at a scale unmatched anywhere in the Global South.
The three phases, in one table
| Phase | Period | Budget Outlay | Key Outcomes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phase I | 2007 to 2015 | ₹935 crore | Computerised 14,249 district and subordinate courts. First generation of the Case Information System (CIS) software rolled out. Judicial officers trained. |
| Phase II | 2015 to 2023 | ₹1,670 crore | Upgraded CIS to version 3.0. National Judicial Data Grid launched in September 2013. eCourts services app and SMS updates rolled out. Video-conferencing infrastructure deployed. |
| Phase III | 2023 to 2027 | ₹7,210 crore | Approved September 2023. Scope includes digitisation of court records, intelligent smart systems, e-filing expansion, virtual courts, translation into Indian languages, and integration with legal aid. |
Phase III is the ambitious one. At ₹7,210 crore it is more than three times the combined spend of Phase I and II put together. We have unpacked that outlay head by head in our eCourts Phase III 7,210 crore breakdown, so you can see exactly which work packages the money funds. It is what the next four years of Indian court digitisation look like.
What eCourts does extraordinarily well
Coverage. The portal reaches more than 18,000 district and subordinate courts plus 25 High Courts and the Supreme Court of India, across 37 states and union territories. No other country in its peer group has done this. The United Kingdom, Brazil, and South Africa are all operating at a fraction of this scale.
Transparency. The National Judicial Data Grid is a public dashboard. Pendency data, disposal rates, case age, and court-level performance are visible to anyone with an internet connection. Researchers, journalists, and citizens can hold the system accountable in a way that was impossible a decade ago.
Standardisation. Case Information System v3.0 imposes a common data model across 3,700+ court complexes. That standardisation is the only reason any aggregator, ours included, can operate at national scale.
Free access. Case data is a public good in India, by law. eCourts enforces that principle at the source. Anyone can look up a case for free.
Where the portal’s design shows its age
This is the part we write carefully, because honest limitation does not mean the portal has failed. It means the portal was built for a specific job, and the legal ecosystem now needs tools for jobs that were not in the original 2007 scope.
- Built for single-case lookup. If you know the CNR number, the portal works. If you want to search across five lakh cases by law, judge, outcome, or date, that workflow does not exist on the portal.
- Captcha-first design. Every lookup goes through a captcha, by design, to prevent automated scraping of the public source. That choice protects the portal. It also makes structured downstream use, for banks, BGV firms, or academic researchers, effectively impossible without an intermediary.
- No third-party API. There is no public API for third-party developers. Startups that want to build on court data have to either run their own ingestion pipeline or partner with an aggregator that has one.
- Search is narrow. Search by case number, party name, or filing number works. Search by judgment text, citation, or semantic query does not.
- Fragmented UX across portals. The Supreme Court, each High Court, and the district court network each maintain separate interfaces. A lawyer following a matter that has travelled from a Delhi district court to the Delhi HC to the Supreme Court has to log in to three different systems.
- Cause lists are daily snapshots. The portal publishes today’s cause list. Historical cause-list retrieval, required for performance analysis and docket prediction, is limited.
None of these are failures. They are design choices appropriate for a public-data portal whose job is to be the canonical source. Solving for the jobs listed above is the job of the private-sector interface layer.
Where private platforms like eCourtsIndia fit
Think of it the way you think about the Reserve Bank of India and a banking app. RBI and NPCI maintain the core payment rails. UPI is a public good. Your banking app is a private experience layer on top of the public rails, doing things the core system was never built to do: spend analytics, rewards, personalisation, customer support.
Court data works the same way. eCourts is the core. eCourtsIndia, and other private aggregators, sit on top as the experience layer. If you want the full picture of how these pieces connect, we have put together a longer post mapping India’s court data stack, from NJDG to APIs to AI agents, which walks through each layer in turn:
- Structured search across 26.8 crore case records with Boolean operators, field-specific queries, and saved searches.
- Real-time alerts the moment a new hearing is listed or a new order is passed on a tracked case.
- REST API and MCP access for BGV firms, lenders, insurers, and legaltech developers who need structured court data inside their own workflows.
- Entity-resolved dockets that stitch together all matters of a given advocate, judge, or party across courts.
- AI order analysis that converts raw order text into searchable, citable insights.
This is not a replacement for eCourts. It cannot be, because it depends on eCourts. It is the application layer the ecosystem builds on top.
What Phase III will change, and what it will not
Phase III is ambitious. Intelligent smart systems, paperless courts, translation into 22 scheduled languages, and deeper integration with enforcement agencies and legal aid infrastructure are all on the roadmap. If even half of that ships on schedule, the base layer of Indian court data becomes dramatically more useful.
What Phase III does not appear to fund, because these are not in the scope of a public digitisation mandate, includes:
- Developer APIs for private-sector use cases (BGV, lending, M&A due diligence, insurance).
- AI-native lawyer productivity tooling.
- Vernacular legal AI for the roughly 80 percent of advocates practising in trial courts.
- Litigant-facing apps with human-friendly design.
- Integration with non-government workflows like contract lifecycle management.
These are not gaps in the Phase III plan. They are opportunities for the private sector. A strong public data layer, which Phase III will produce, is the precondition for everything the private sector needs to build on top.
Why this matters for India’s legaltech decade
The Indian legal services market was valued at around $2.64 billion in 2026 and is structurally underserved by technology. For context on how the sector travelled from typewriters and paper cause lists to crore-scale case databases, take a look at our history of Indian legaltech from 1948 to 2026. Legaltech inside that market has been on a 15 to 25 percent CAGR path, depending on the segment. (Sources: Grand View Research 2024, Ken Research 2024, Tracxn 2025 estimates.)
Every startup in that market, and every round the VCs are pricing, depends on one thing being true: that a reliable public data source exists and that it stays updated. eCourts is that source. Phase III is what keeps it reliable. Private platforms that build on top of it are how that reliability reaches the lawyer, the lender, the compliance officer, and the litigant.
That is the stack. It works because every layer does its job.
What this means for eCourtsIndia
We work on top of eCourts, not against it. Our job is the experience layer: the search that actually works, the alert that actually fires, the API that actually responds. Our 26.8 crore structured records are there because the eCourts project made tens of thousands of courts legible in the first place.
When someone asks whether we are a replacement for the government portal, the honest answer is no. We are a complement to it. eCourts is the foundation. We are one of the interfaces built on that foundation, the way a banking app is built on UPI, and the way a news reader is built on an RSS feed.
If the Phase III rollout hits its marks, our job gets easier. If the legal system keeps digitising at the pace the last decade has set, this becomes one of the richest public datasets in the world. We are here to make sure that the people who need it, the 2 million advocates, the litigants with pending cases, the banks running due diligence, and the developers building the next generation of legal tools, can actually use it.
Search a case on eCourtsIndia → ecourtsindia.com/search
Find a lawyer → ecourtsindia.com/lawyer
Find a judge → ecourtsindia.com/judge
Sources and further reading
- Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of India: Cabinet approvals for Phases I, II, and III of the eCourts Mission Mode Project.
- eCommittee, Supreme Court of India: Vision documents and annual reports.
- National Judicial Data Grid: njdg.ecourts.gov.in
- eCourts Services: services.ecourts.gov.in
- Grand View Research, 2024: India Legal Services Market Report.
- Ken Research, 2024: India Legaltech Outlook.
- Tracxn, 2025: Legaltech India Funding Summary.