What is the E-SCR Project? Find out about the Digital Version Of Judgments Reported In Supreme Court

Under the direction of the Chief Justice of India, Dr. Justice Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud, another step is taken towards fulfilling the objective of digitization of the Indian Judiciary as a tribute to the nation in the New Year. The electronic Supreme Court Reports or e-SCR project is finally being officially launched by the Supreme Court on 2nd January 2023.

 ALSO READ: Who was Satyendra Nath Bose? Find Out About The Mathematician and Physicist here!

What is the e-SCR Project?

• The e-SCR Project is an initiative that will provide the digital version of the Supreme Court's judgments in the manner as they are reported in the official law report - 'Supreme Court Reports'.
• This project will take a step forward toward fulfilling the objective of digitization of the Indian Judiciary.
• The project aims to bring in a positive change for the benefit of all the stakeholders of justice, primarily litigants and members of the Bar as also the High Courts, National Law University, Judicial Academies, etc.

Benefits and Advantages

• Judiciary is aligning more with technology and the e-SCR project proves to be an important initiative  
• The project entails manifold benefits, including those: 

1. reduction in the burden of traveling.
2. browsing through huge volumes of journals in libraries 
3.  enhancing its accessibility to those with visual disabilities, as they may now be able to access them through their screen reading software.

The electronic Supreme Court Reports project aims give free access to the official law reports of the Supreme Court's reported Judgments to the law students, lawyers & other legal professionals and to the public at large.

What will the e-SCR project do? 

• The e-SCR project will showcase replica soft copies of SCRS by utilizing the verifiable authentic soft copies as available in the PF format. 
• This project would create an invaluable resource as the entire gamut of judgments from the inception of the Supreme Court in the year 1950 till date would be available on e-SCR and digital repository.

Challenges faced 

• Digitization and scanning of Supreme Court Reports (SCR) from the year 1950 to 2017 and preserving the same in digitized soft copy in the format of PDF (Portable Document Format). 
• It assists the Registry in creating a digital repository in the Supreme Court's reported judgments in soft form. 

 The challenges before the registry included:  

1. Segregation/splitting of reported judgments where the reported judgments, are compiled in the form of Supreme Court Reports (SCR).

2. Pertaining to the years 1950 to 2017, were compiled in the form of a book wherein the judgments were not segregated to form an individual judgment.

3. Comprising officials of the Judges Library and Editorial Section worked tirelessly and within a short span of 15 days.

4. Almost 34,013 judgments were split to create a database suitable for meeting the requirements of the proposed search engine with the facility of elastic search. 

• Followed by the extraction and verification of MetaData so that various kinds of search techniques may be deployed through the search engine. 
• The metadata extracted by the Machine Learning Tool, developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) Pune, in respect of all the 34,013 reported judgments has been duly verified within a short span of 15 days.

How does it work?

• A search engine developed by the SCI with the help of NIC, Pune comprising an elastic search technique in the database of e-SCR. 
• The search facility in e-SCR provides 

1. for free text search, 

2. Search within the search, 

3. case type and case year search,

4. Judge search, 

5. year and volume search, 

6. bench strength search options.

The inbuilt elastic search facilitates quick and user-friendly search results.

Te-SCRSCR project will be rolled out on the Supreme Court's website and would also be made available on the mobile application of the Supreme Court of India as also on the Judgment portal of the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG).

ALSO READ: Why Are Jains Protesting For The Shikhaji And Palitana Temple? Explained.