A litigant from a remote district could check the status of her case on her mobile phone. A lawyer from Chennai could argue in front of a bench in Delhi without getting on a plane. A law student from a small town could watch a hearing of the Constitution Bench, perhaps for the first time, without setting foot in a courtroom. None of this is incidental. It is the product of nearly two decades of meticulous planning and execution by India's judiciary and executive in one of the most ambitious modernisation programmes that any large legal system has attempted.

With Indian courts progressing towards e-filing, virtual hearings, AI-enabled legal research, and an exponentially growing volume of electronic evidence, critical questions arise: Where does the legal ecosystem, comprising legal, technological, and institutional dimensions, currently stand, and what is needed for it to effectively harness this ongoing technological transformation? Furthermore, how close are we to fulfilling the promise enshrined in the Constitution of India of securing justice for all, particularly in the context of judicial delays and the huge backlog of cases?

The contention being made is that while India has been very quick to build legal machinery and technology, it has been relatively slow in building people and institutions to utilize those laws and technologies, and it's that balance that really determines readiness.

The e-Courts Project: Beyond the Pandemic

Many people have the impression that India started pushing for its digital courts only when COVID-19 came around, but this is not true. The National e-Governance Plan also contained the e-Courts Mission Mode Project of 2007. For this aspirational project, Phase I (2011-15) had ₹935 crore and Phase II (2015-23) had ₹1,670 crore. Phase II had already deployed computerised case information systems, wide-area network connectivity and e-filing services in most district and subordinate courts before the pandemic forced all court buildings to shut. Without this foundation, virtual hearings would never have reached their current scale in just a matter of weeks. Phase III, approved it is a step change in ambition, if not yet in annual funding. Its proposed budget is ₹7,210 crore for over four years. It emphasises a paperless system which is digital-first, interoperability and greater emphasis on online dispute resolution.

Against a sanctioned outlay of ₹7,210 crore over four years, the pace of release is worth noting: the binding constraint on Phase III may now be absorptive capacity rather than sanction. The second is that a significant proportion of the programme is aimed at training and capacity building rather than hardware, and that is the right emphasis. A server can be procured in a week; fluency cannot. Bringing judges, registry staff, clerks and the bar up to the standard the systems already assume is the harder and more consequential task.

Virtual Hearings and a Changing Judiciary

The visible part of this shift is the virtual hearings. These are now a permanent feature of Indian courts rather than a pandemic workaround. In Swapnil Tripathi v. Supreme Court of India, the Court held that live-streaming proceedings of constitutional importance is an extension of the open-court principle traceable to Article 145(4). The Supreme Court began streaming Constitution Bench matters in September 2022. The e-Committee's Model Rules for Video Conferencing, 2020 have been adopted, with local variations, by most High Courts. Most importantly, Section 530 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 allows for criminal trials, inquiries and proceedings, which include recording of evidence and examination of witnesses, to take place electronically. Virtual justice has moved from administrative circular to statutory mandate, and that is a change of kind, not of degree.

The National Judicial Data Grid is a genuine transparency achievement: few large democracies publish court data at this granularity, especially since 2023 the Supreme Court's own case data has been brought onto it. However, the grid also offers a candid portrait of the limitations of digitization. Pendency across all courts continues to exceed 5 crores, highlighting that technology can make visibility and access easier than it can increase processing capacity. While the Grid can tell a litigant where her case currently sits, it cannot, on its own, advance her case. Consequently, readiness remains a district-level phenomenon, and the gap between a well-funded commercial court in a metropolitan area and a taluk court struggling with intermittent connectivity remains a central reality in India's justice reform landscape.

This issue goes two ways. Video conferencing removes the cost of travel for a litigant who has a smartphone and a stable connection, and reproduces exclusion for one who has neither. The judiciary has responded with e-Sewa Kendras, assistance kiosks at court complexes to help litigants e-file, get case status, and join hearings, which are now running at the Supreme Court, the High Courts and district courts. These are the most underrated component of the entire programme and the one most worth expanding, because they are what prevent a digital-first court from becoming a court that is harder to reach than the one it replaced.

Evidence, Crime, and the Changing Rulebook

Cyber justice has two dimensions: how courts function digitally, and how they adjudicate disputes born of the digital world. The first now rests on the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023. Section 61 provides that an electronic record shall not be denied admissibility merely because it is electronic, and Section 63 carries forward, in expanded form, the special regime that Section 65B of the Evidence Act, 1872 contained. The certificate requirement survives too, now in a prescribed form containing a hash value, and Supreme Court precedents ranging from Anvar P.V. v. P.K. Basheer to Arjun Panditrao Khotkar v. Kailash Kushanrao Gorantyal. That framework survived its first constitutional challenge in May 2026. In Pune Bar Association v. Union of India, a three-Judge Bench upheld Section 63(4) and the Schedule against the argument that hash-value disclosure and expert certification are unworkably onerous, describing the hash value as an electronic fingerprint and expressly invoking the risk of manipulated and AI-generated material. The Court also loosened the practical bottleneck, holding that any person with genuine expertise in computer science or cyber forensics may sign Part B; the certifier need not be an Examiner notified under Section 79A of the IT Act while leaving the outer limits of that category open.

The real test lies ahead, in trial courts rather than High Courts, as magistrates apply these provisions to WhatsApp chats, cloud-hosted records and deepfake audio and video whose very authenticity is the contested fact. Here the statutory scheme reaches its limit. A certificate can attest to the process by which a record was retrieved; it cannot attest that the event the record depicts ever occurred. Closing that gap is the coming decade's evidentiary problem, and it will be solved by forensic capacity rather than by drafting.

But the second dimension is much more difficult. The Information Technology Act, 2000, targets e-commerce, but its purview in light of current circumstances has been extended and interpreted to include a variety of acts. In Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, the Supreme Court struck down Section 66A, as it imposed restrictions on the right to freedom of speech promised by Article 19(1)(a). It was also too vague and overbroad, and could not be excused by the exceptions present in Article 19(2). The new criminal codes have begun to fill the space: Section 111 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 expressly brings cybercrimes having severe consequences within the definition of organised crime, and Section 105 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita mandates audio-video recording of search and seizure. There are institutions, such as the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre and the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal, which enable citizens to report cybercrimes, a resource that wasn't there ten years back. But, from there on till the stage of conviction, there's a lack of skilled professionals and resources, specifically digital forensics labs, properly trained investigating officers, and prosecutors, everywhere. So, the limitation is more at the district level than the actual legislation.

Data Protection and AI: The Two Quiet Frontiers

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 has moved from statute to operation, its Rules having been notified in November 2025 with obligations phased in thereafter. What is left undiscussed is that the courts themselves hold an enormous quantity of personal data: medical histories in matrimonial disputes, financial records in commercial suits, complainants' identities in sexual-offence proceedings, and identity documents in very nearly every filing.

Section 17(1)(b) exempts processing by a court, tribunal or other body entrusted by law with a judicial, quasi-judicial, regulatory or supervisory function, where the processing is necessary for the performance of that function. The exemption is defensible: judicial records cannot be made subject to erasure requests, and a right to withdraw consent would be incoherent applied to a case file. However, it is not as wide as it seems at first blush on two points which have not been examined in detail. First, it disapplies Chapter III and Section 16, and only partially so Chapter II, as Sections 8(1) and 8(5) survive it, and Section 8(5) is exactly the duty to take appropriate measures to ensure that personal data breaches are prevented. The judiciary is exempt from consent and from data-principal rights; it is not exempt from the duty to secure. Secondly, the exemption applies to processing that is necessary for the performance of the judicial function, which doesn't necessarily cover the registry's administrative processing, including e-filing portal accounts, e-payment records, and staff details, which runs parallel to this. The minute e-filing becomes the norm, then the entire system hinges on how well a single software vendor configures their portal, which could potentially open up in a couple of hours what the physical records room protected over 100 years. For the judiciary, this requires its own data governance strategy, featuring its own retention rules, redaction policies, tiered access rights, and incident response plan, that it will need to draft for itself because the DPDP Act has basically refused to provide it. Artificial Intelligence is being introduced into the courts with considerably less urgency, and much more thoughtfulness. SUVAS (Supreme Court Vidhik Anuvaad Software) translates court decisions into vernacular languages; SUPACE (Supreme Court Portal for Assistance in Court Efficiency) helps judges and researchers to find and cross-reference case files; and the Court has employed AI-based live transcription during Constitution Bench hearings. Each of these uses, however, operates on the periphery of judicial activity (language translation, information retrieval, and verbatim recording) and none of them is permitted to participate in any part of the decision-making process. This careful approach is not mere caution; experience suggests it is warranted. State v. Loomis, where the Wisconsin Supreme Court approved the use of a proprietary software tool in determining a criminal sentence, without allowing the defence to inspect the software's code, still serves as a warning, and the use of generative AI tools in drafting opinions by other courts around the world has met with significant resistance. The reason for this is a matter of logic rather than technicality. A judgment has to be understandable and appealable. An output that cannot explain itself cannot be meaningfully appealed, and a system from which there is no meaningful appeal is not a court.

What Comes Next?

Sustaining the momentum calls for attention in five areas.

First, digital fluency among judges, registry staff and advocates outside the metros; the binding constraint is training, not equipment.

Second, that we embed cybersecurity in judicial data systems, rather than tack it on after the fact, which should be obvious, given that court networks contain information at least as sensitive as what is held by banks and yet are far less heavily protected.

Third, reliable connectivity and power at taluk and district level, without which every other reform is theoretical.

Fourth, accredited digital forensic capacity at district level, so that electronic evidence is tested by expertise rather than accepted or rejected on impression.

Fifth, convergence of state-level implementation, which remains uneven, towards a common minimum standard.

So, is India's legal infrastructure ready? The honest answer is that the architecture is in place and the capacity is still being built. India has, in under two decades, assembled a statutory and technological framework that several far wealthier judiciaries have not, and has done so while carrying the largest case pendency in the world. What it hasn't managed to bridge is the gap between what the systems are designed to do, and what those running them are actually trained for. That is where law schools like SRM School of Law come in. They equip their students not only with knowledge of the new laws, but also with the ability to navigate their implementation: how to authenticate an electronic document, how to dispute it, how to hold a hybrid hearing, how to consider the contents of an e-file with due diligence. The true test of cyber justice readiness will come not in the number of crores allocated or the infrastructure installed, but in whether the lawyer in the district court is able to prove a WhatsApp chat and whether the judge on the other side of the screen knows how to assess it.

Author is a Pro-Vice Chancellor at SRM, School of Law. Views are personal.