Bombay High Court Collects Database Of 40.5K Institutional Litigants, To Commence Automatic E-Service

In a major step towards automatic electronic services in the judicial process the Bombay High Court has become the first and the only High Court to include country-wide data of all institutional litigants.

According to a new circular, High Court and District court’s Case Information System (CIS) will now have a database of information relating to over 40,500 institutional litigants, country-wide like government departments, constitutional bodies, commissions, institutions, banks, universities, educational institutions etc.

The High Court circular highlights the enormous immediate benefits of such a database. For example, if a new case is filed in Maharashtra, the respondent body anywhere in the country can automatically be notified about the filing. Also, once the respondent body is known, the nearest court can be located, with the associated bailiff.

“Then service can be rapidly effected in digital form by transmitting the notice or warrant and an accompanying filing in soft copy to the court nearest to the defendant or respondent entity, with a request to effect service directly there,” the circular states.

Moreover, “statistical data can now be collected in a manner never possible before (e.g., the number of cases by or against insurance companies, the period of pendency, and so forth). This facilitates granular policy decisions to isolate classes of cases for quicker disposal,” the circular adds.

It further mentions that achieving this database was a “mammoth task” as it involved collecting basic information about roughly “40,500 entities.”

The circular adds that the information was then matched to census- based demographic data (addresses, email id, phone and mobile numbers, names of the representatives, etc).

“The Bombay High Court is the first, and so far the only, High Court to have achieved this. This data is a major step towards automating electronic services in the judicial process,” the circular states.

The codified information includes data of the State Government, the Central Government, the Corporations of both, Government companies, Public Sector Banks, Insurance companies, Cooperative Sugar factories, Cooperative Cotton mills, Agricultural Produce Market Committees, Urban local bodies, Rural local bodies, National, Scheduled, Non-Scheduled, Cooperative Banks, Universities, Colleges, all Police Stations in Maharashtra, all Prisons in India, Private and Public Limited companies, and more.

As of now service would have to be done by the parties/lawyers personally or by the bailiff, consuming labour and delaying the judicial process to some extent. Parties are also known to dispute service, resulting in further delay in the hearing. This can get even more time consuming when parties are located in different States/Cities across the country.

The High Court has also issued a slew of other circulars including setting up an “AI Assisted Legal Translation Advisory Committee” under the directions of the CJI DY Chandrachud to translate important Supreme Court (SC) and HC judgements in Marathi using AI technology. So far 114 such judgements have been translated by the Bombay HC.