Most Indian courts now accept, or require, e-filing of at least some documents. That sounds like modernisation, and in a narrow sense it is — fewer trees, less physical storage, filings that don't require standing in a queue at a filing counter. It has not, in most jurisdictions, meaningfully reduced how long it takes a case to actually move through the system, because the underlying process being digitised was never redesigned.
This is an opinion piece, not a case report: everything that follows is the author's argument, not a neutral summary of settled law.
Digitising a bottleneck doesn't remove it
A great deal of current e-filing simply moves the same paper-era steps online: a document is prepared in a format meant for printing, uploaded as a scan or PDF, and then manually checked by court staff for the same formatting and completeness issues that used to be caught at a physical counter. The bottleneck — manual review, sequential processing, dependence on court staff availability — survives the transition to digital largely intact.
What digital-first would actually look like
- Structured data entry instead of scanned documents, so case metadata — parties, dates, case type — is machine-readable from the moment of filing, not re-keyed by staff later.
- Automated completeness checks at the point of submission, catching missing signatures or documents instantly rather than after a manual review cycle.
- Real-time case status and cause-list visibility for parties and counsel, rather than requiring a court visit or a call to the registry to find out where a matter stands.
- Interoperability between courts, so a case's litigation history is retrievable without re-filing paperwork every time it moves between forums.
The measure of digital-first courts isn't whether the filing happened on a screen. It's whether the process changed at all once it got there.
The eCourts project has the right idea, the wrong pace
The eCourts Mission Mode Project has made real progress on exactly this kind of structural digitisation, including case information systems and virtual hearing infrastructure that proved genuinely valuable during pandemic-era court closures. The gap is implementation consistency — capability that exists in some High Courts and district courts and not others, with no uniform baseline litigants can rely on regardless of which court their matter happens to land in.
What success would look like
Not a portal you can upload a PDF to. A system where filing a case, checking its status, and tracking it across appeals doesn't require knowing which specific registry clerk to call. Until every court, not just the well-resourced ones, reaches that baseline, 'India has e-filing' is a description of an interface, not of a modernised court process.
References
- [1]eCourts Mission Mode Project — Department of Justice, Government of India.
Vikram writes about how legal institutions actually function in practice — courts, legal aid systems, regulators — and where their design falls short of their stated purpose. He edits Legal Chronicle's editorial section.