What we are building, in one paragraph

Most countries have one place to look up a court case. India has dozens. The Hon’ble Supreme Court has its own portal. Each of the twenty five Hon’ble High Courts has its own. District courts run on a separate national portal. Tribunals, e-filing, services, and cause lists all sit on different domains, with different logins, different search logic, and different ideas of what a party name looks like. A small business owner in Indore who simply wants to know whether a notice has been issued in a cheque bounce case has to navigate three or four of those websites, in a particular order, and hope nothing times out. eCourtsIndia exists to make that whole experience disappear. We bring every Indian court, every order, every cause list, every advocate, and every judge into a single search box, so that one query in plain language returns a clean, structured, instant answer.

We are not a research database for senior advocates. We are not a contract tool for general counsel. We are a public reference layer for Indian law, free for citizens at the point of use, built so that the next generation of legal products, AI tools, banks, journalists, and policy researchers can stand on it.

India runs on data utilities. Law is the last one left to build.

Almost every large sector of the Indian economy was unlocked by one piece of shared data infrastructure before its products could truly flourish. Payments got UPI. Identity got Aadhaar. Tax got GSTN. Credit got the credit bureaus. Tolls got FASTag. Each one quietly became a public utility that thousands of other products were then built on top of. The law never got its utility. Yet the law underwrites every contract, every loan, every property title, and every dispute in a country of more than 1.4 billion people, and its data is at once the most valuable and the most broken in the country. More than 5 crore pending cases sit scattered across two dozen government portals, each with its own search box and its own idea of what “last updated” really means. The cost of that fragmentation is not abstract. It shows up as cases lost to years of delay, as credit refused to small businesses no one can quickly check, and as ordinary people who cannot find out what is happening in their own matter.

That missing utility is what we are building. The unglamorous, compounding work is the whole point: ingesting hundreds of millions of raw court records, resolving the same litigant across mis-spelt names and inconsistent case numbers, enriching orders with plain-language summaries, and indexing the entire graph for sub-second search. A query that used to cost a lawyer twenty minutes across four government websites now returns in about a second. Multiply that across every search on the platform and the saving becomes the point of the whole project.

The moment a data layer becomes the thing other products depend on, it stops being a product and starts being infrastructure, and infrastructure rarely gets disrupted. It gets depended on, partnered with, and extended. The reference layer for Indian law is going to exist. We intend to be the ones who build it, and to keep the front door of it free for the citizens it belongs to. Get this one layer right and a great deal moves at once: access to justice for people who cannot afford an intermediary, cleaner lending for small businesses, a district bar that can finally work with the tools of a top firm, and a homegrown legal-AI industry built on Indian sources. That is the scale of the prize, and the reason we are building for the long term rather than the quick win.

Our mission

Three commitments sit underneath that line. First, the basic service stays free at the point of use for citizens, students, and journalists. The infrastructure of justice should not have a paywall in front of the front door. Second, every fact we publish is traceable to an official source. We do not summarise without showing the original order, and we do not assert without showing the case number. Third, we treat the Indian judicial system with the respect it deserves. Courts are referred to by their proper honorifics. Judges are not characterised. Litigation is reported, not editorialised.

The problem we decided to take on

India has more than 5 crore pending cases, a live figure tracked by the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), the government’s official pendency dashboard, which updates daily. The average matter takes three to five years at the district level and five to ten years on the High Court side. Behind those numbers are real people. A widow in Patna trying to inherit a flat. A weaver in Varanasi waiting nine years for a partition decree. A small contractor in Pune chasing a cheque that bounced in 2018. A journalist in Bengaluru trying to confirm whether a politician is genuinely on bail in three states. None of them should have to learn what a CNR is, what a cause list is, or which of twenty five government domains owns the answer.

A meaningful part of that friction is not judicial capacity. It is information friction. Lawyers, banks, journalists, researchers, and citizens spend an enormous amount of time simply navigating the plumbing of the system before any actual legal work begins. That time has a price. The Indian economy carries a measurable annual cost from delayed matters, much of which is not the judges’ time but the time of everyone trying to find their way to the judges in the first place. Bringing that information cost down, even by a little, is one of the highest leverage things anyone can do for access to justice in this country.

That is the problem we decided to take on. Not another research tool for the top of the legal pyramid, but the information layer that sits underneath the whole system, available to the entire pyramid at once.

What is live today

Since launch we have brought the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India, all twenty five Hon’ble High Courts, and the entire district and taluka network onto a single platform. Every state and every union territory, from Andaman and Nicobar to West Bengal, is searchable from one box. A large and growing roster of national tribunals and commissions is live too, so the specialist forums that decide company insolvency, tax, debt recovery, telecom, electricity, consumer, environment and service disputes are searchable from the same place as a district court cheque bounce matter. Cause lists, orders, judgments, advocate profiles, judge information, and party history all sit on top of the same graph, so a single search can move sideways from a CNR to the lawyer who appeared, to the bench that heard the matter, to other matters listed the same day.

The tribunal coverage now runs deep, and each forum has its own detailed walkthrough. We cover company insolvency through NCLT and NCLAT, tax through the ITAT and CESTAT benches, lender recovery through every Debts Recovery Tribunal and DRAT, securities through the Securities Appellate Tribunal, telecom and power through TDSAT and APTEL, and consumer disputes across the NCDRC, State and District consumer commissions through e-Jagriti. Alongside these sit the Central Administrative Tribunal, the National Green Tribunal, the Armed Forces Tribunal, the Railway Claims Tribunal, the Competition Commission of India, SEBI orders and the GST appellate bodies, with the roster still expanding.

For a sense of how this scope shows up in practice, our explainer on the CNR number walks through the unique identifier that makes pan India search possible, our reference on the 71 case status codes explains what a single line of court output really means, and our overview of bench types in Indian courts demystifies why cause lists look the way they do.

How the platform is built

Underneath the simple search box are three layers, each of which has to work for the whole thing to feel fast and trustworthy.

Layer 1. The data backbone

Raw court data in India is messy. Party names are spelt three different ways inside the same case file. Case numbers use one format on the district portal and another on the High Court portal. A single matter can travel from a Magistrate’s court to a Sessions court to a High Court bench across a decade and four different case numbers. Our backbone ingests data from every official source, cleans it, de-duplicates litigants, resolves entities across courts, can generate an optional plain-language summary for an order, and indexes the whole graph so that a search returns in under a second. This is the unglamorous work that makes everything else feel instant.

Layer 2. The public portal

This is the face of the platform that anyone can use without an account. A unified search box that takes a CNR, a party name, an advocate name, a judge name, or plain-language keywords and returns full-text results across every court, matching on case titles as well as the text of orders and judgments. On top of search, we publish a free lawyer directory built from court records, a comprehensive judge index, daily district and taluka cause lists filterable by court, judge, party or advocate, and a searchable archive of orders and judgments with optional plain-language summaries. Our walkthrough on how to find a lawyer in India shows what a real search looks like end to end.

Layer 3. AI tools and the open API

On top of the data and the portal, a small set of focused tools and a clean API. The AI Clerk helps a lawyer or a litigant manage the case file: organise a case under a client, upload documents, summarise orders, and turn on email and WhatsApp alerts so you hear about an order, hearing, or status change soon after it appears on the court portal. LegalCheck turns a person or a company into an identity-first litigation report for banks, lenders, HR teams, and acquirers (how LegalCheck works). The Enterprise API and MCP server (40+ MCP tools for AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT) let fintechs, legaltech startups, background verification platforms, insurers, and corporate legal teams build on Indian case data without scraping. We also publish a machine readable directory of Indian courts, explained in our post on LLMs.txt for Indian courts, so AI agents can reason about Indian law from public, official sources.

Around that core sits a growing set of everyday tools. Android and iOS apps put case search and tracking on the phone, and a Chrome extension gives you quick case lookups while you work. Crime Reports holds 25 lakh+ FIR PDFs from a dozen states and union territories, and the list keeps growing. The verified advocate directory lets a litigant contact bar-card verified lawyers directly, and Add a Missing Case lets anyone request a case we have not yet indexed. IndiaCode is our free statute book of 10,000+ Acts and 2.7 lakh+ sections, linked to the judgments that read them, and the tribunal CNR generator gives matters from 14 tribunals a 16-character CNR of their own.

What changes when this exists

The point of building infrastructure is not the infrastructure. It is what becomes possible on top of it. When every Indian court is searchable from one place, a number of small frictions across the country disappear at once.

Why this is the moment

This work could have been attempted a decade ago. It would not have worked. Three things have changed in the last few years that make a unified, citizen friendly layer for Indian courts not just feasible but overdue.

India’s courts are going digital, at scale

Under the eCourts Mission Mode Project Phase III, the Union Government has committed thousands of crores to court digitisation through 2027, with significant outlays in successive Union Budgets. This is one of the largest investments any democracy has ever made in modernising its judiciary, and it is producing an ocean of structured, machine readable data. Someone has to turn that data into something a small business owner or a district court advocate can actually use. We exist to do exactly that, as an independent, non-government platform.

AI has finally caught up to the problem

Five years ago, summarising a district court order written in mixed Hindi and English legal prose, extracting the parties, classifying the relief, and explaining the outcome to a small business owner, all at low cost, would have required a research lab. Today, it is an engineering problem with known answers. The moment that became true at court scale, doing it became almost an obligation. Roughly three in four Indian lawyers already use AI in some form, so the missing piece was never appetite. It was structured court data the AI could actually read.

Indians are showing up online for everything else

UPI, DigiLocker, Aadhaar, Bharat Net, and the broader digital public infrastructure stack have already taught a billion Indians that public services can be fast, free, and on the phone. People expect the same of their interaction with the courts. The expectation will not unmake itself. The question is only who builds it.

Who we serve

Internally we say the platform has four kinds of users, and we design for all four with equal seriousness. None of them is more important than another.

• The everyday citizen. The small business owner waiting on a cheque bounce case, the tenant tracking an eviction, the parent in a custody matter, the senior citizen in a property dispute. They do not want to learn what a CNR is. They want an answer in their own language, and a link to the actual order. They are the reason the basic service stays free.
• The district court advocate. The backbone of the Indian bar. Practises across multiple benches, works out of a chamber rather than a firm, and cannot justify a fifty thousand rupee research subscription. We give her unified cause lists, hearing notifications, and tools that used to belong only to senior counsel. Our guide on vacation benches and judge leave was written for exactly this user.
• The institutional user. The compliance head at a bank, the deal team at a PE firm, the BGV team at a fast growing startup, the in house counsel at a public sector enterprise. They need structured, audit grade litigation data on every person and entity they touch. The API and LegalCheck are built for them.
• The Indian AI builder. The team of three engineers in Bangalore or Pune building the next legal AI product. They want to focus on their product, not on scraping twenty five government websites for eighteen months. Our API and MCP server are how they skip that part of the journey.

The team

eCourtsIndia is built by Billion Insights Ventures Pvt. Ltd., a small founder-led company with one office in Delhi and one in Cary, North Carolina. The two co-founders are brothers-in-law, one based in India and one in the United States. That is a deliberate bridge for a company whose data is entirely Indian but whose engineering leans on US-tier AI and data experience. Together they have spent the better part of three decades building consumer and B2B platforms across India and the United States, and they think India’s broken court-data infrastructure is the single biggest leverage point in the country’s legal system.

Rachit Jain, Co-founder & Director

India-based. Leads product, growth, and storytelling. Earlier, Rachit founded Youth4work, a profiled-talent and recruitment platform that he scaled to over seven million users, raising more than fifteen crore rupees along the way, and that was acquired by iNurture Education in 2023. The fifteen years he spent building consumer platforms in markets where willingness to pay is low and trust matters more than advertising, patience, free tiers, word of mouth, is the same playbook now underpinning how we think about the district court lawyer and the everyday litigant. Based in Delhi. Reachable at rachit at eCourtsIndia.com, and on LinkedIn and X.

Tarun Jain, Co-founder & Director

US-based. Technical co-founder. Leads engineering, AI, and the data backbone. Tarun has spent more than twenty five years building search, computer vision, OCR, document AI, and large-scale data systems. He was previously founder and CEO of FaceTouchUp, a US-based plastic-surgery visualisation platform used by cosmetic surgeons internationally and recognised as a Top Surgery Solution in 2021. At eCourtsIndia, he architected the ingestion, entity-resolution and AI layer that turns messy raw court data into the structured, searchable graph that sits underneath the product. Educated at North Carolina State University. Based in Cary, North Carolina. Reachable at tarun at eCourtsIndia.com, and on LinkedIn and X.

We run lean on purpose. The bet has always been that one good data pipeline beats fifty headcount. We are hiring engineering, data, and legal hires now, and we always want to hear from people who have spent time inside the Indian judicial system, advocates, clerks, registrars, paralegals, and from engineers who want to work on the largest legal data problem in the country.

How we treat data

All case data on eCourtsIndia is sourced from official, public Indian court portals. We do not host private documents, we do not buy data from informal sources, and we do not edit the substance of any order. Where a court takes down a record, we take it down. Where a court orders redaction, we redact. We follow the takedown frameworks set by the Hon’ble High Courts and the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India for sensitive categories such as matrimonial matters, juvenile justice, and victims of sexual offences. If you believe a record on our platform should be removed, our contact page has the right route.

Where we are headed

The next phase of the work is less about adding new courts and more about deepening the experience inside the courts we already cover. Native language summaries in Hindi and the major Indian regional languages, so a litigant in rural Bihar or coastal Kerala reads her own order in her own language. Voice based search for low literacy users. Far better timeline visualisations of long running matters, so a ten year journey through three courts becomes legible at a glance. Open research datasets for academic and policy work, on terms that respect privacy. And a steady widening of the tribunal coverage, until every quasi judicial forum that affects ordinary Indians is one search away too.

If we get this right, the Indian judiciary, ten years from now, looks recognisably the same to a constitutional purist and completely transformed to a citizen using it. The benches stay where they are. The honour and authority of the courts stay where they are. What changes is the experience of standing in front of them, of finding out what is happening, and of acting on it.

Working with us

If you are a citizen or a student, the easiest way to support the work is to use the product, share it with one person who has a pending case, and tell us when something is wrong. If you are a journalist or a researcher, our data and case histories are available for public interest work, and we are happy to help. If you are a bank, an enterprise, or a legaltech team that wants to integrate Indian court data into your own product, our API and LegalCheck are documented and our team can help you get started.

eCourtsIndia, at a glance

Frequently asked questions