Digital Justice and Women’s Access to Justice in India: A Socio-Legal Analysis of ECourts, Digital Exclusion, and Algorithmic Governance
Main Article Content
Abstract
Digitisation has transformed the architecture of judicial administration and legal remedy provision in India.
Digitisation projects such as electronic filing, video conferencing, mobile case tracking, and artificial intelligence
pipelines that are being developed as part of the e-Courts Integrated Mission Mode Project are intended to address
some of the long-standing problems such as geographical constraints, process frictions, and institutional backlog.
However, the availability of technology alone does not guarantee equality-based legal empowerment. Indian
women face structural disadvantages when it comes to their ability to access and use technology due to differential
ownership of hardwares, limited access to data, low technical literacy, linguistic disempowerment, and intense
surveillance in patriarchal familial arrangements. In this paper, we carry out a socio-legal critical assessment of
the issues pertaining to the nexus of digitisation of courts, gender disparities, and legal technologies in India. This
paper questions the neutrality of procedure and seeks to demonstrate why digitised court systems have the
potential to exacerbate structural disenfranchisement of women trying to obtain civil, criminal, and family law
remedies. This is how this article formulates an analytical framework based on six dimensions, namely material
access, cognitive ability, spatial and communicational autonomy, procedural confidentiality, systemic fairness of
algorithms, and accountability with a human-in-the-loop. Going further than just implementing infrastructure,
digital justice needs to implement procedural citizenship.
Article Details
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