Over 42,500 Supreme Court judgments translated into regional languages using AI

New Delhi: With an increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in legal work, 36,324 Supreme Court judgments have been translated into Hindi and 42,765 verdicts have been translated into 17 regional languages, as on date, and made available on the e-SCR portal, the Parliament was informed on Friday.

Minister of State (Independent Charge) of Law and Justice, Arjun Ram Meghwal said, in a written reply in Lok Sabha, that AI Translation Committees of the High Courts are monitoring the entire work relating to translation of the Supreme Court and High Court judgments into vernacular languages.

Highlighting AI initiative in legal research and translation, MoS Meghwal said Al is being used in areas such as translation, prediction and forecast, improving administrative efficiency, Natural Language Processing (NLP), automated filing, intelligent scheduling, enhancing the case information system and communicating with the litigants through chatbots.

The MoS said under e-Courts Project Phase III, an attempt is being made to integrate modern technologies for smoother user experience and to build a "smart" system in which registries will have minimal data entry and scrutiny of files.

To create a smart system, the latest technologies like Al and its subsets Machine Learning (ML), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) are being used in the e-Courts software applications, the MoS said.

As on date, 17 High Courts have already started placing, e-High Court Reports (e-HCR) or e-Indian Law Reports (e-ILR) on their websites, the MoS said, adding that e-HCR/e-ILR are digital legal platforms that provide online access to judgments in the vernacular languages.

Replying to a question on how the government plans to address concerns regarding data privacy in relation to AI usage, MoS Meghwal said a sub-committee consisting of six judges of the various High Courts, assisted by technical working group members consisting of domain experts, has been constituted by the Chairperson of the eCommittee of the Supreme Court to recommend secure connectivity and authentication mechanisms for data protection, to preserve the right to privacy.

He said the sub-committee is mandated to critically assess and examine the digital infrastructure, network and service delivery solutions created under the eCourts project for giving solutions for strengthening data security and for protecting the privacy of citizens.

Citing use of technology in legal work, he said that the daily proceeding of each case is entered in the Case Information System (CIS) and the litigant is made aware of the same from the eCourts service platforms like website and Mobile Applications.

Apart from this, there are model rules in place for live-streaming and recording of court proceedings.