What Is the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG)?
The National Judicial Data Grid is India's public dashboard of case pendency and disposal data. This explainer covers what it is, what it shows, who it is built for, and what it does not do.
Explainer · Court Infrastructure
Ask a court how many cases are pending before it, how old the oldest ones are, or how fast it is clearing its backlog, and until a few years ago there was no single place to check. The National Judicial Data Grid, or NJDG, was built to answer exactly that question, in near real time, for courts across India. This page explains what the NJDG actually is, what data it shows, who relies on it, and where its limits are for a working lawyer or legal team.
- What the NJDG is: a public dashboard at njdg.ecourts.gov.in showing case pendency and disposal data for courts across India, run by the e-Committee of the Supreme Court.
- Coverage: district and taluka courts since 2015, High Courts added in 2020, and the Supreme Court integrated in 2023.
- What it shows: pending and disposed case counts, case age brackets, and crores of orders and judgments, updated near daily.
- Who it is for: mainly court administrators, policymakers, and researchers; lawyers use it to gauge how backed up a court is.
- What it does not do: track an individual case, search case law by legal point, or send alerts. Those need the eCourts Services portal, a judgement search tool, or a case management tool.
01What the NJDG is
The National Judicial Data Grid is a public database that collects and displays case pendency and disposal data from courts across India, updated close to daily. It is available at njdg.ecourts.gov.in, and it is run by the e-Committee of the Supreme Court of India, in coordination with the Department of Justice.
Think of the NJDG as a national dashboard sitting on top of the eCourts system. Every computerised court enters its case data into a local system called the Case Information System, or CIS. That data then flows up into the NJDG, which aggregates it into a searchable, filterable set of statistics: how many cases are pending in a given court, how many were disposed of in a period, and how old the pending cases are.
NJDG and eCourts are not the same thing
eCourts is the broader government programme that computerises courts and lets you look up a single case by its CNR number. The NJDG is the analytics layer built on top of that data, focused on pendency and disposal statistics rather than individual case lookup. For the full picture of eCourts itself, see our explainer on e-filing in Indian courts.
The NJDG does not tell you the status of one case. It tells you the health of an entire court, or an entire state, at a glance.
02How the NJDG came together
The NJDG was built in stages, and which courts it covers has expanded steadily since launch.
| Stage | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2015 | District and taluka courts were onboarded to the NJDG as part of the eCourts Mission Mode Project, giving the system its first national pendency picture at the trial court level. |
| 2020 | High Court data was added to the NJDG, extending the dashboard beyond district courts for the first time. |
| 2023 | The Supreme Court was integrated into the NJDG, so the grid now spans all three tiers of the Indian judiciary in one place. |
Each stage mattered because before it, that tier of the judiciary had no unified, public pendency dashboard. A researcher or policymaker who wanted to know how many cases were pending across all district courts in a state, for example, had no single source to check until 2015. Extending the same idea to High Courts and then the Supreme Court took several more years of integration work.
03What data the NJDG shows
The NJDG is built around a few core numbers, and it lets you slice them by court, state, case type, and time period.
- Pending cases: the total number of cases currently before a court, or a state, or the country as a whole.
- Disposed cases: how many cases a court has closed in a given period, which lets you see clearance rate against new filings.
- Case age brackets: pending cases are broken down by how long they have been pending, for example under one year, one to three years, and so on up to more than twenty years. This is one of the most cited features of the NJDG, because it shows backlog depth, not just backlog size.
- Case type: civil and criminal matters are shown separately, and many courts break this down further by matter type.
- Orders and judgments: the NJDG also holds a large volume of orders and judgments uploaded by district courts, running into crores of documents, alongside the pendency statistics.
Because the underlying data is refreshed from the CIS feed most days, the NJDG is closer to a live operational dashboard than a static annual report. That is a meaningful difference from, say, an annual court statistics publication, which might be a year or more out of date by the time it is read.
04Who uses the NJDG, and why
The NJDG was built primarily as a governance and transparency tool, not a lawyer's day-to-day utility, and its main users reflect that.
Court administrators and judges
High Court judges, District Judges, and court registries use the NJDG to monitor pendency in courts under their administrative control, spot courts where backlog is growing, and plan judicial resources accordingly.
Policymakers and the judiciary at large
The NJDG is the primary public source the Law Commission, the Department of Justice, and the higher judiciary use to track how the system as a whole is managing its caseload, including in discussions about judicial vacancies and infrastructure.
Researchers and journalists
Because the data is public, it is regularly used in reporting and academic research on court delay and case backlog in India.
Lawyers and law firms
Individual advocates use the NJDG less often, but it is genuinely useful for a specific purpose: getting a realistic sense of how backed up a particular court is before advising a client on timelines, or before deciding where to file a matter if there is a choice of forum.
05How a lawyer or legal team can use the NJDG in practice
The NJDG is not built for individual case lookup, but it has a few practical uses that go beyond simple curiosity.
Setting realistic client expectations
Before telling a client how long a matter might take, checking the pendency and age-bracket data for the specific court can ground that estimate in real numbers instead of a guess.
Comparing courts before filing
Where a matter could reasonably be filed in more than one court, comparing pendency and disposal rates on the NJDG can inform that choice, alongside the usual jurisdictional and strategic considerations.
Tracking a court over time
Because the data updates near daily, a firm that regularly appears before a particular bench or court can watch its pendency trend over months, which is useful context for docket planning.
What the NJDG will not do is tell you the status of your own specific matter, alert you when a hearing date changes, or let you search case law by legal point. Those are different jobs, covered below.
06What the NJDG does not do
The NJDG is a statistics dashboard, and being clear about that boundary avoids wasted time looking for something it was never built to provide.
It does not track your individual case
The NJDG shows aggregate numbers, not a per-case timeline with the next hearing date. For that, you need the eCourts Services portal and a case's CNR number, or a dedicated case tracking tool that sends you alerts.
It does not search case law by legal point
The NJDG holds orders and judgments as documents, but it is not a legal research tool. It cannot find every judgment on a specific point of law or return a verified, citable authority. That is a separate job handled by judgement search products.
It does not send proactive alerts
Like the rest of the eCourts ecosystem, the NJDG is a portal you visit and query. It does not notify you when a court's pendency crosses a threshold or when a case you care about changes status.
Data quality follows the source
Because the NJDG is built entirely from data that court staff enter into the CIS, its accuracy depends on how consistently each court updates its records. Coverage and freshness can vary by state and by court.
07NJDG and where court data lives
The NJDG itself is government infrastructure, run by the e-Committee of the Supreme Court and hosted within India's government systems, so the question of where the underlying case data physically sits does not usually come up for the NJDG in the way it does for private legaltech products.
It becomes relevant, though, once a law firm or corporate legal team starts using private software that pulls in eCourts and NJDG data, layers case management or AI search on top of it, and stores that combined dataset on its own servers. At that point, where that data is hosted, and under which country's laws, is a real question for any firm handling client or litigation data. If that is relevant to your team, see our explainer on data residency in legal software and our roundup of legal software with data residency in India.
08Where Claw fits
Claw is an all-in-one legaltech platform for Indian advocates, law firms, and corporate legal teams, combining AI-based case search, an AI legal assistant (Legal GPT), case management, and compliance automation across all Indian courts and tribunals. It is positioned as India's first all-in-one legaltech platform of this kind.
The NJDG is a public statistics dashboard, not a per-matter tracking tool, so it answers a different question than the one most lawyers face day to day: what is happening in my own cases, right now. Claw's case management module tracks individual matters across 8,200 plus courts, including all states, tribunals, and district courts, pulling case updates automatically and sending WhatsApp and email alerts when something changes. On the research side, Claw's AI-based case search covers 25 High Courts and the Supreme Court with verified, court-ready citations, which is the kind of legal-point research the NJDG was never built to do.
In short, the NJDG is useful background context on how busy or backlogged a court is. For tracking your own matters and researching case law day to day, that is a separate job, and it is the one a platform like Claw is built for.
09Frequently asked questions
What is the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG)?
The NJDG is a public dashboard, run by the e-Committee of the Supreme Court of India, that shows case pendency and disposal statistics for courts across the country. It is available at njdg.ecourts.gov.in and is updated close to daily from the same data courts enter into the eCourts system.
Which courts does the NJDG cover?
District and taluka courts were onboarded to the NJDG in 2015. High Court data was added in 2020. The Supreme Court was integrated in 2023, so the NJDG now covers all three tiers of the Indian judiciary in one dashboard.
Can I check the status of my own case on the NJDG?
Not directly. The NJDG shows aggregate statistics, such as total pending cases and case age, rather than a per-case timeline. To check a specific case, use the eCourts Services portal with the case's CNR number.
Is the NJDG the same as the eCourts portal?
No. eCourts is the broader government programme that computerises courts and lets you look up individual cases. The NJDG is the analytics layer built on top of that data, focused on pendency and disposal statistics rather than single-case lookup.
Can lawyers use the NJDG for legal research?
Not for research by legal point. The NJDG holds a large volume of orders and judgments as documents, but it is not built to search case law by proposition or return citable authorities. That requires a dedicated judgement search tool.
How often is NJDG data updated?
The NJDG is updated close to daily, since it is fed from the Case Information System that court staff use to enter case data. This makes it closer to a live operational dashboard than a periodic report, though data freshness can vary by court.