SC to roll out Electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) Project on Jan 2

The Supreme Court is going to launch the Electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) Project on Monday in order to provide free digital access to the official law reports of the apex court's reported judgments passed since 1950.

"In yet another step forward towards fulfilling the objective of digitization of Indian judiciary under the directions ofthe Chief Justice of India, Dr Justice Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud, electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) project is being officially launched by the Supreme Court of India on January 2, 2023 as a tribute to the nation in the New Year," an official statement said.

The e-SCR Project is an initiative to provide the digital version oft Supreme Court's judgments in the manner as they are reported in the official law report - 'Supreme Court Reports'.

"This is a project which, in essence, endeavours to take a step forward towards fulfilling the objective of digitization of Indian Judiciary and underlines the vision 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," it said.

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"As the Judiciary is aligning more with technology, the e-SCR project is an important stepping stone for future of the modern Indian Judiciary and entails manifold benefits, including those of reduction in burden of traveling and browsing through huge volumes of journals in libraries, as also for enhancing its accessibility to those with visual disabilities, as they may now be able to access them through their screen reading software," it added.

The Electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) Project aspires to provide free access to the official law reports of the Supreme Court's reported judgments to law students, lawyers and other legal professionals and to the public at large.

"The e-SCR project will showcase replica soft copies of SCRs by utilising the verifiable authentic soft copies. 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," the official said.

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

"However the challenges before the registry included segregation or splitting of reported judgments where the reported judgments, compiled in the form of Supreme Court Reports (SCR), 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," it further said.

"A team comprising officials of Judges' Library and Editorial Section worked tirelessly and within a short span of 15 days, 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," it further said.

The SC has developed a search engine with the help of NIC, Pune with elastic search technique in the database of e-SCR. The search facility in e-SCR provides for free text search, search within search, case type and case year search, Judge search, year and volume search, and bench strength search options. The inbuilt elastic search facilitates quick and user-friendly search results.

The e-SCR project will be rolled out on the Supreme Court’s website and will also be made available on the mobile application of the Supreme Court as well as on the Judgment portal of the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), it added.