Chief Justice of India Surya Kant on Saturday outlined an ambitious vision for the country’s courts, placing technology at the heart of judicial reform and the future of the Rule of Law. Speaking at the Regional Judicial Conference of Western States in Jaisalmer, he said the judiciary stood at a turning point where decisions made now would shape both institutional strength and the quality of justice for decades.
In his address, hosted by the National Judicial Academy along with the Rajasthan High Court and the Rajasthan State Judicial Academy, the CJI said technology had grown far beyond an administrative tool. It now functioned as a constitutional instrument that could expand access to justice, strengthen equality before the law, improve transparency, and support more predictable outcomes.
He explained that digital systems allowed courts to track delays, locate bottlenecks, and plan using real-time data. This, he said, made courts more responsive and helped ensure that judicial decisions reflected clarity, consistency, and accountability. Citizens looked to courts not only for remedies but for assurance that the law would be applied fairly and liberties would be protected.
Justice Kant called for a Unified Judicial Policy to reduce fragmentation across High Courts, which often follow dissimilar procedures and adopt technology at different rates. While he acknowledged this diversity as a natural feature of India’s federal structure, he said technology now made it possible to think of justice as part of a single national ecosystem with shared standards.
According to him, a unified approach would harmonise procedures, strengthen a common digital backbone, create uniform judgment formats, improve the clarity of judicial writing, and group similar legal issues more effectively. None of this, he added, would undermine the federal character of the judiciary.
He described predictability as the soul of the Rule of Law, rooted in precedent, reasoning, consistency, and timely adjudication. Tools like digital dashboards and case-flow management systems, he said, played a key role in building this predictability.
Justice Kant also highlighted the constitutional urgency of prioritising cases where delay could cause serious and irreversible harm. These included matters involving personal liberty, urgent interim relief, economic rights, and family or social justice issues. He noted that soon after assuming office, he had issued an administrative direction to fast-track such cases. Institutional frameworks, he said, should make urgency a structured priority, not a matter of individual judgment.
Pointing to platforms like the National Judicial Data Grid, e-courts, and AI research tools, the CJI said technology helped improve coherence and public trust. Its true value, he added, lay in how clearly people could understand judicial outcomes and feel confident that justice had been served.
The two-day conference is being attended by several Supreme Court judges, Rajasthan High Court Acting Chief Justice Sanjeev Prakash Sharma, judges of the Rajasthan High Court, and more than 100 district and sessions judges.
