Technology-driven governance can become a barrier to justice when it is not designed around its users. Discuss with reference to digital authentication requirements in quasi-judicial processes.

Digital tools are meant to make justice faster and easier to reach. But a mandatory step that ignores how people actually use a system can stall decisions that have already been made. The ECI's ECINet portal shows this. It required Aadhaar-based authentication before judges of West Bengal's 19 Appellate Tribunals could upload orders, and more than 38 lakh voters' cases got stuck [1].

How badly designed authentication obstructs justice

• The bottleneck was technical, not judicial. Judges were deciding cases, but the login step held up the final orders [1].
• The tribunals were set up by the Supreme Court and staffed by judicial officers from a Calcutta HC list [1][2]. Yet they depended on a login rule set by the ECI, whose roll decisions they review. This weakens judicial independence.
• Rights are at stake. Under Article 326, voting depends on being on the roll. A decided case that cannot be uploaded before polls still leaves the voter out.
• One method was forced on every user. OTPs tied to Aadhaar-linked phones cause friction. Puttaswamy (2018) requires that mandatory Aadhaar use be proportionate.

Why authentication still matters

• An order that adds or removes a voter must be traceable to the judge who passed it. Otherwise orders could be forged.
• The IT Act, 2000 already gives electronic signatures legal validity and non-repudiation, meaning the signer cannot later deny signing [4].
• Caveat: India's eSign service is itself based on Aadhaar e-KYC. 34.41 crore eSigns had been issued by 2022 [3]. So "e-sign" alone may not remove the same friction.

Way forward: design around the user

• Accept several signature methods, including token-based Digital Signature Certificates that do not depend on Aadhaar, for officers the High Court has already verified.
• Publish tribunal data on cases filed, decided, signed and uploaded, so bottlenecks show up early.
• Count a judge's date of decision for supplementary-roll deadlines, so portal faults do not cost anyone their vote.
• Size capacity to the caseload. The Supreme Court has already drawn in judicial officers from Odisha and Jharkhand [2].

Digital public infrastructure helps justice only when it fits the people who use it: the judge, the official and the citizen. ECINet's move to e-signing is a useful correction [1]. Building user-centred, flexible authentication into quasi-judicial platforms by default would serve Article 14's guarantee of fair procedure and SDG 16.3 on equal access to justice.