Midway mark milestones: CJI Chandrachud and his venture to transform Indian judiciary

• Among his biggest initiatives to make the Supreme Court more inclusive and widely accessible to the public has to be his decision to allow live-streaming of the Constitution Bench hearings. Simultaneously, CJI Chandrachud ensured that listing of cases became a smooth, seamless process by making the whole system technology-friendly and accessible.                                                                   

• Chief Justice Chandrachud’s tenure so far has been action-packed, giving the Supreme Court a number of milestones. Below is a recall of some of the big initiatives:

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• During his tenure, the Supreme Court managed to attain its full strength of 34 judges at one point of time. And today, with three new judges taking oath, the Supreme Court will once again attain its full strength.

• Launching of litigant-friendly facilities, including the hybrid (online & offline) hearing system has helped in speeding up disposal of long-pending cases.

• Revamp of the case listing and hearing systems has resulted in the daily listing of 10 transfer petitions and 10 bail applications before each bench of the Supreme Court.

• Another major systemic overhaul is the new mechanism of reserving each day of the week for taking up cases relating to specific categories, such as criminal matters, MACT (Motor Accidents Claims Tribunal) matters, arbitration matters, etc.

• Also, a new system of mentioning matters has ensured that all urgent cases are mentioned timely before the court in an organised manner.

• In order to cut down and eventually eliminate the use of paper, CJI Chandrachud has ensured e-filing for advocates, including an online appearance portal for advocates and litigants. Since May this year, 9,913 fresh cases have been registered using the new e-filing module.

• Every month, approximately 5,500 Letter Petitions and 10,000 e-mail petitions are received in the PIL English section, which is now processed digitally.

• Despite inheriting 69,647 cases, the pendency over the year has not gone up much and stands at 70,754 cases. This is because of the speedy disposal and clearing of old, long-pending cases in a time-bound manner, and other measures taken by the Chief Justice.

• In order to make the justice delivery system transparent and accountable, CJI Chandrachud has pushed for digitisation of all judiciary-related information. Recently, the Supreme Court made public all its case data through the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) portal.

• Under the CJI’s initiative, the Supreme Court has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with IIT Madras to facilitate the digital transformation of the Indian judiciary.

• Gender-equality is another major mission of CJI Chandrachud. In a significant step towards a gender-just judiciary, the Supreme Court of India recently launched a Handbook on Combating Gender Stereotypes, aimed at eradicating gender stereotypes from the judicial discourse.

• CJI Chandrachud has time and again talked about the rights of every marginalised section of society, and to demonstrate that he has made the Supreme Court premises an example. On his initiative, universal rest rooms were created at different locations in the Supreme Court complex to make it accessible to the LGBTQIA+ community.