eCourts Phase III: How Far India's Paperless Courts Push Has Actually Gotten

The Union Cabinet approved Phase III of the eCourts Project on 13 September 2023 - a four-year initiative with an outlay of roughly Rs 7,210 crore for ICT development of the Indian judiciary, building on the case-management and digitization groundwork laid by Phases I and II.

Per the government's own framing, Phase III aims at 'maximum ease of justice' through digital, online, and paperless courts: digitizing legacy court records, universalizing e-Filing and e-Payments through e-Sewa Kendras in court complexes, building a unified technology platform connecting courts, litigants, and other stakeholders, and expanding hybrid courts, live streaming, and cloud-based infrastructure.

As of July 2026, the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) - the platform aggregating case data from participating courts - provided access to information on more than 32.46 crore cases, and more than 4.15 crore video-conferencing hearings had been conducted through the system. These are official, cumulative progress figures reported through the project's own channels, not an independent audit - useful as a scale indicator, not as proof that every individual court complex is now fully digitized.

Cause-list and case-status data availability is the raw material that automated court-diary and case-tracking tools depend on - see our companion article on automated eCourts sync for what that kind of tooling can and can't solve. The more courts complete digitization under Phase III, the more reliable that kind of automation becomes as a category, though it remains only as accurate as the underlying government data source at any given court.

Phase III is a multi-year, nationwide rollout, and individual court complexes vary widely in actual digitization maturity at any given point in that rollout. A firm with matters across multiple courts shouldn't assume every court in its docket is equally far along on the unified platform - that's still worth confirming court by court.