What is the electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) portal?

About e-SCR portal

• It was an initiative by the Supreme Court (SC) of India to provide the digital version of the apex court's judgments in the manner as they are reported in the official law report.
• It provides free access to about 34,000 judgements of the SC to lawyers, law students, and the common public.
• These verdicts will be available on the apex court website, its mobile app, and on the judgment portal of the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG).
• It is a free service available for lawyers across the country.
• The Supreme Court has developed a search engine with the help of the National Informatics Centre comprising 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.

National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) portal

• The NJDG portal is a national repository of data relating to cases instituted, pending, and disposed of by the courts across the length and breadth of the country.
• In this portal, one may access case-related information, statistics such as institution, pendency, and disposal of cases, case types, and the year-wise break-up of the Supreme Court of India.
• It is a database of orders, judgements, and case details of 18,735 District & Subordinate Courts and High Courts created as an online platform under the e-Courts Project.
• It has been developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in close coordination with the in-house software development team of the Computer Cell, Registry with an interactive interface and analytics dashboard.
• The entire database will be periodically updated on the NJDG portal.
• NJDG works as a monitoring tool to identify, manage, & reduce the pendency of cases.
• It helps to provide timely inputs for making policy decisions to reduce delays in disposing of cases and reduce case pendency.

Q1) What is the National Informatics Centre (NIC)?

National Informatics Centre (NIC) under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is the technology partner of the Government of India. It was established in 1976 with an objective to provide technology-driven solutions to Central and State Governments in various aspects of development. NIC has been instrumental in adopting and providing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and eGovernance support to the Central Government.

Source: Supreme Court e-SCR portal launched in Hindi; online portal to ensure prompt release of prisoners also launched