Public Data, Private Experience: A Manifesto for the Indian Court Data Layer

Last updated: 23 September 2026

Public court data in India belongs to everyone, yet raw access and a usable experience are two different things. This manifesto sets out how eCourtsIndia.com builds a private experience layer on top of the public eCourts system: crediting the source, keeping search free, staying honest about coverage, and improving speed and usability without ever enclosing data that is public by law. It also lists what we will not build and will not do, so readers can hold us to it.

India has a long tradition of public infrastructure becoming the foundation for a rich private ecosystem. Indian Railways carried 741 crore passengers in 2025-26, about 2 crore a day, according to the Ministry of Railways, and IRCTC and hundreds of booking apps sit on top. UPI processed 2,451 crore transactions in August 2026 alone, a record month in NPCI’s data, and PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm sit on top. The National Payments Corporation runs the rails; the private sector runs the experience. That model is the right way to think about court data too.

This post is a manifesto for that view. The eCourts Mission Mode Project is the rail. Private companies, including eCourtsIndia.com, are the experience layer. The public side is not the enemy of the private side. They need each other. Here is how we think about the responsibilities of each layer, what we build, what we refuse to build, and what we commit to as a private operator.

Key takeaways

• Court records in India are public by design. Two decades of public investment through the eCourts Mission Mode Project built the rails.
• What was missing is the experience layer: one search across every court, alerts that arrive, documented APIs, AI that reads orders, and apps people actually use.
• Search stays free. Case search, cause lists and the lawyer and judge directories cost nothing. We charge only for work that costs us money to do, and every price is on a public page.
• We do not replace, imitate or criticise the government portal. The official record is the authority, and we point back to it.
• We publish only numbers we can verify, we flag gaps, and we let anyone report a missing case.

The three responsibilities of the public layer

• Run the rails. The Supreme Court e-Committee and the Department of Justice are responsible for the underlying infrastructure: the Case Information System, the National Judicial Data Grid, public portals, and the physical and digital plumbing that connects thousands of district courts and every High Court. Phase III of the project carries a Rs 7,210 crore outlay for 2023 to 2027, per the Press Information Bureau, and our Phase III breakdown explains what it funds.
• Guarantee citizen access. Every citizen should be able to search for their own case, get a hearing date and download an order from the official system, free of charge. That is a non-negotiable public good.
• Maintain authority. The canonical version of any Indian court record is the official record. Private aggregators reflect it. They do not replace it.

We respect each of these. Our product at eCourtsIndia.com is designed to sit above the public infrastructure, not alongside it or instead of it. Every case record we serve is sourced from the official stack, and we point users back to the authoritative source when they want to verify. We do not attempt to be the system of record for Indian litigation. We do not need to be. Our primer on how India digitised its courts covers what the public side has built.

The three responsibilities of the private layer

• Productise the experience. Translate the public record into workflows, integrations and interfaces that litigants, lawyers and businesses actually need, at the speed and scale they need them.
• Invest in depth and completeness. Entity resolution, freshness, reliability and developer-grade access are expensive to maintain. The private layer earns its place by funding that work.
• Extend, do not enclose. A private layer should make it easier, not harder, for the next builder to innovate on top. Open APIs, published pricing and documented data shapes are the baseline.

What we build on top of the public record

Court records are public by law, but the experience that makes them usable is not, and that gap is what eCourtsIndia exists to close. Today that means these surfaces, each built on the same public foundation:

1. One search across every court. The Supreme Court, all 25 High Courts, district and taluka courts in all 36 states and union territories, and 18 tribunal and commission types, searchable by party, advocate, judge, CNR or case number across 32 crore+ case records. Free at ecourtsindia.com/search.
2. Alerts that arrive. WhatsApp and email alerts when a tracked matter gets a new order, hearing date or application, plus Android and iOS apps and a Chrome extension.
3. An AI Clerk for the working lawyer. Matters organised by client, synced with the court record, with AI summaries of orders. Grounded in the corpus, not invented.
4. An API and an MCP server. A documented REST API with 23 endpoints, and an MCP server any AI agent can call. We do not pick a winner among agent surfaces; we make the substrate they all need.
5. Public law made usable. IndiaCode turns 10,084 Acts and 2,69,602 provisions into searchable sections linked to the judgments that cite them. It may be the purest example of this manifesto: the text is public, and we make it easier to use. The IndiaCode launch post explains how.
6. Identifiers where the public system has none. Tribunals such as the NCLT, ITAT and NGT run their own registries and do not issue CNRs. Our tribunal CNR generator mints a deterministic identifier for 14 tribunals, and we published the full specification so anyone can reproduce it.

None of these duplicates what the government portal does. All of them extend it. Regional-language search and AI over vernacular orders are the next frontier, and we will announce that work when it is ready rather than before.

What we will not build

• A second public records system. The government already runs one, and we have no ambition to replace it. Our work sits on top, not in parallel.
• A walled garden. The data we structure stays accessible through documented APIs and a documented MCP server. We do not lock customers into integrations they cannot leave.
• A scraper that asks lawyers to do the plumbing. Either we structure the corpus and ship a clean substrate, or we have failed at our job.
• A product that ignores the trial court tier. District and taluka courts hold the large majority of India’s pending cases, according to the National Judicial Data Grid. A product that prices out the district advocate is not the product India needs. We made that argument in The District Court Lawyer Is Ninety Percent of Indian Law.

What we will not do

An authoritative platform is defined as much by what it refuses to do as by what it ships. These are the floor, not the ceiling.

• We will not publish numbers we cannot verify against a source. Moving totals are rounded down and marked with a plus sign, and fixed counts are checked against live data before they go out.
• We will not let an AI invent a precedent. The AI Clerk and our MCP tools answer from the corpus. A citation that is not in the record should never reach a lawyer.
• We will not charge to search public records. Search, cause lists and the lawyer and judge directories stay free, and the official portals remain free too. We charge only for work that costs us money to do: case tracking at Rs 5 per case per month, alerts at Rs 0.50 each, AI order summaries and order PDF downloads at Rs 2, and FIR PDFs from Crime Reports at Rs 1. Every price is on the pricing page.
• We will not impersonate an official judicial system or present ourselves as a government portal. eCourtsIndia is a non-government initiative, and we say so.
• We will not fabricate quotes from judges, lawyers or public figures.

How we relate to the government portal

The eCourts services portal is the public records system and the foundation we work on. The relationship is complementary, not competitive. The portal is organised around one case lookup at a time because that is exactly what a public records system is meant to do, at national scale, for every citizen.

The experience layer is missing from the public portal not because the public side is failing, but because experience work is not the job of a public records system. NPCI does not build consumer payment apps. The Aadhaar system does not build consumer KYC products. GSTN does not build accounting software. The public substrate is the foundation, and the private layer is invited to build on top. That pattern works across India’s data utilities, and it works here.

This shapes how we talk about our work. We do not denigrate the government portal. We are grateful for it. Two decades of careful public investment got the underlying data to where we can build the experience on top. When the official portal is the right place for a user to go, we send them there.

Our commitments

Drawing from the above, these are the commitments we live by. We name them so users and partners can hold us to them.

1. We will always credit the source. Every record traces back to its originating court. We do not claim ownership of the underlying data, only of the structure and interface we add.
2. We will not lock the ecosystem. Our API is publicly documented, pricing is published at ecourtsindia.com/pricing, and we do not use exclusive deals to block other aggregators.
3. We will build for the developer. Clear docs, a token-authenticated REST API with Rs 200 in free credits for new accounts, and an MCP server for AI-native builders.
4. We will be honest about coverage and freshness. If a state’s feed is lagging, we say so. If a case is missing, anyone can report it through Add a Missing Case, and our cause lists state plainly that they cover district and taluka courts today.
5. We will respect confidentiality. We follow the redaction and sensitivity norms established by the courts, and we do not surface material the court system has chosen not to publish.
6. We will verify before we vouch. Advocate profiles are free to claim, and the verified advocate directory marks only profiles checked against a bar card. The profile claim guide explains the process.
7. We will stay complementary. The public system is the foundation. We are on top. If our positioning ever drifts toward replacement, we will correct it.

Why this matters for the market

A healthy public-private legal data ecosystem is an advantage for India. Developers and founders can build on a stable public foundation without worrying that the foundation will compete them out of existence. Courts benefit because the private layer pushes accuracy, completeness and accessibility forward. Businesses and citizens benefit because the experience keeps improving.

This is already the model for payments (UPI), identity (Aadhaar and DigiLocker), and increasingly for agriculture (AgriStack) and logistics (ULIP). There is no reason the same pattern cannot work for legal data, and in many ways it already does. We lay out the wider architecture in The Operating System for Indian Law.

A note on tone

There is a temptation in private-sector writing to frame the public sector as slow or behind. That framing is unfair to the teams at the Supreme Court e-Committee, the Department of Justice, the National Informatics Centre and the High Courts who have, over two decades, built one of the largest judicial technology systems in the world. We commit, in our content and our positioning, to treat the public system with the respect it has earned.

We extend the same respect to peers. Indian Kanoon, Manupatra, SCC Online, LegitQuest, CaseMine and others have each contributed to the ecosystem. Competition is healthy. Disrespect is not useful.

What this means for eCourtsIndia

This manifesto is our public accountability statement. Every product decision, every price and every post should be readable against it. If we ever ship a feature or publish a claim that reads inconsistently with these commitments, a reader should be able to flag it, and we should respond. Our dated build log shows how the product has grown against these principles so far.

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See the live product at eCourtsIndia.com, search any case free at ecourtsindia.com/search, or explore the REST API and MCP server.

Related reading

• Inside eCourts: How India Digitised Its Courts
• eCourts Phase III: What INR 7,210 Crore Will Build
• The Operating System for Indian Law
• Data moats when LLMs are a commodity

Sources

• Supreme Court e-Committee publications and Department of Justice eCourts project documentation
• Press Information Bureau, eCourts Phase III outlay of Rs 7,210 crore, 2023 to 2027
• Ministry of Railways via Press Information Bureau, 741 crore passengers in 2025-26
• National Payments Corporation of India, UPI product statistics, August 2026 (2,451 crore transactions)
• National Judicial Data Grid, pendency by court level
• Right to Information Act, 2005

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