National Judicial Data Grid

Also called: NJDG · Topic: Justice Delivery: Subordinate Courts, Tribunals, Legal Aid and Judicial Reforms · NCERT: Beyond NCERT

Meaning

The National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) is an online database that shows how many cases are pending and how many have been decided in each court. It covers district courts, High Courts and the Supreme Court, it is updated almost in real time, and anyone can check it.

It matters because India has more than 5 crore pending cases. The NJDG puts this backlog in public view, court by court, so judges and governments can see where delay is worst and act on it.

Explanation

What it is and where it came from

• Pendency means the backlog of cases: cases filed in court but not yet decided. The NJDG is the main public tool for tracking it.
• It was built under Phase II (2015-2023) of the e-Courts project.
• The e-Courts project is a national e-governance plan (a Mission Mode Project) to bring computers and the internet into courts.

• The Department of Justice runs it with the e-Committee of the Supreme Court [1].

• Phase II also produced:

• Case Information System (CIS) software
• e-filing and e-payment
• virtual courts for traffic challans
• video-conference hearings

What it covers

• Court-wise and case-wise data: pending and decided cases for each court.
• Coverage over time:
• At first, it covered only High Courts and district courts.

• The Supreme Court joined the NJDG in September 2023. Since then, all three levels of courts are on one grid.

• Open to all: any citizen, lawyer, researcher or journalist can see the data. Nobody needs special access.

What the data shows

• Where the backlog sits:
• About 85-87% of pending cases are in district and subordinate courts.
• About 13% are in High Courts.

• Fewer than 1 lakh are in the Supreme Court.

• 31 December 2025 (Law Ministry reply in Parliament): High Courts had 63,70,904 pending cases and district and subordinate courts had 4,43,45,599. That adds up to about 5.07 crore [2].

• How old the cases are (2021):
• Nearly 45 lakh cases had been pending for more than 10 years in High Courts and subordinate courts together [4].

• In High Courts, 21% of cases were over 10 years old and 41% were over 5 years old [4].

• Trend: pendency grew by about 2.8% a year between 2010 and 2020. In the COVID year 2019-20, it rose by 20% in High Courts and 13% in subordinate courts [4].

Limits

• The data is only as good as what courts enter.
• Courts sometimes enter cases wrongly or forget to update a case's status.

• So the figures can be wrong.

• The NJDG only shows the delay; it does not fix it.

• Its numbers help only if someone acts on them by filling judge posts, cutting adjournments (postponing a hearing to a later date) and clearing old cases.

• Privacy:

• Court records hold personal data about victims, children and parties.
• Putting them online raises data-protection concerns.

In the Constitution and practice

• No constitutional article creates the NJDG. It is an e-governance tool of the e-Courts project. It serves duties that the Constitution already sets out:
• Art. 21 and speedy trial: in Hussainara Khatoon v. Home Secretary, State of Bihar (1979), the Supreme Court held that a speedy trial is part of the right to life and personal liberty. The NJDG helps track whether courts are meeting this standard.
• Art. 235: the High Court controls the district courts. NJDG data shows each High Court the delay in its own district courts. This matters because most of the backlog is at that level.

• Arts. 233-234: district and subordinate judges are appointed by the Governor with the High Court. NJDG data on the size of the backlog supports the case for filling these posts.

• Who uses it:

• High Courts and district courts use it to manage their cases.
• The Law Ministry uses pendency figures in its replies in Parliament [2].

• Citizens and researchers use it to check delay.

• In practice:

• Arrears Committees in all 25 High Courts and in district courts target cases pending for more than five years [2][3]. Data like the NJDG's helps them pick out these old cases.
• e-Courts Phase III: the Union Cabinet approved it on 13 September 2023. It is a Central Sector Scheme (fully paid for by the Centre) worth ₹7,210 crore for four years [1]. It aims at "digital, online and paperless courts", with all court records digitised and stored on the cloud. This should give the NJDG a fuller digital base.
• Privacy check: the right to privacy is part of Art. 21 (K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, 2017). Court data put online must respect it.

Don't confuse with

• e-Courts project: the whole national plan to digitise courts, with Phase I from 2007 and Phase III from 2023 to 2027. The NJDG is only one output of it, built in Phase II.
• Case Information System (CIS): case-management software used inside courts. The NJDG is the public, national grid that shows pending and decided cases.
• ICJS (Inter-operable Criminal Justice System): links courts with police, jails and forensic labs. The NJDG tracks only court cases and their pendency.
• e-Sewa Kendra: a help desk inside a court complex where people get help with e-filing, case status and e-payment. It is a physical service point, not a database.

Prelims Hooks

• The Supreme Court joined the NJDG in September 2023. Before that, the NJDG covered only High Courts and district courts.
• The NJDG was created under Phase II (2015-2023) of the e-Courts project, not Phase I or Phase III.
• Which body does what: the e-Committee of the Supreme Court drafted the 2005 National Policy and Action Plan for ICT (information and communication technology) in courts. The Department of Justice carries out the e-Courts project.
• Where pendency sits: about 87% of pending cases are in district and subordinate courts, not in High Courts or the Supreme Court. On 31 December 2025, these courts had about 4.43 crore pending cases [2].
• e-Courts Phase III is a Central Sector Scheme worth ₹7,210 crore for four years, approved on 13 September 2023 [1]. Trap: the judicial infrastructure scheme (since 1993-94) is the Centrally Sponsored one.
• The NJDG is not a constitutional or statutory body. It is an online database under an e-governance project.

Mains Points

• Open data as a tool for accountability:
• The NJDG makes delay visible court by court. This helps High Courts use their control under Art. 235 and helps Arrears Committees target cases over five years old [2][3].
• It supports the Art. 21 right to a speedy trial (Hussainara, 1979) by showing where undertrials and old cases are stuck. (An undertrial is a person held in jail whose trial has not finished.)

• But data alone does not cut delay. It must go along with filling vacancies, raising the judge-population ratio from about 21 per million towards the target of 50 [5], and enforcing the three-adjournment limit.

• Reliability and rights trade-off:

• Gains: transparency, research based on facts, and planning for how many judges each court needs (the rate of disposal method of the Law Commission's 245th Report, 2014).
• Costs: wrong or outdated entries weaken the figures, and personal data online raises privacy risks after Puttaswamy (2017).

• Reforms: regular checks on the data entered, and a data-protection framework for court records.

• Federal coordination:

• The NJDG and e-Courts are run nationally (Phase III is centrally funded [1]).
• Subordinate courts, however, are run by the states and controlled by the High Courts (Arts. 233-235).
• Shared data standards and a permanent national body for judicial infrastructure, such as the proposed National Judicial Infrastructure Authority (2021), could close the gap between central digital systems and state-level staffing.

Related concepts

• Judicial pendency
• Judge-population ratio
• e-Courts project
• Virtual courts
• Justice delayed is justice denied

Read more

• Pendency, judicial capacity and the e-Courts project