Approach:

Introduction: Mention the potential use of ICT in the justice delivery system.

Body: Mention the need for adopting new information and communication technologies like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Also briefly mention the challenges in adopting such technologies in the judiciary. Mention the precautionary steps that need to be taken to address these challenges.

Conclusion: Summarise the answer.

Answer:

The use of ICT in the justice delivery system (e-court) is to enhance judicial productivity, both qualitatively & quantitatively, to make the justice delivery system affordable, accessible, cost-effective, predictable, reliable and transparent by way of virtual hearings, e-filling of petitions, assist in the translation of judgements in regional language etc.

This can be manifested from the holding of total hearings of approximately 2.8 Crores cases till May 31, 2023, at all levels of the Indian Judicial system.

Need for ICT in the judiciary:

1. Pendency of Cases: The recent National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) shows that 3,89,41,148 cases are pending at the District and Taluka levels and 58,43,113 are still unresolved at the high courts. With the opening of the virtual courts, some of these pending cases could be transferred to these courts, thus, reducing the burden of pending cases on the Indian Judicial system.  
2. Strengthen the Right of Access to Justice: As a tiny section of society have access to the conventional physical Courts and even if they have, it is accessible at a disproportionate expense as well as effort. However, with Virtual Courts, such issues can be resolved as they help in saving the costs of travelling for litigants and help in saving the substantial costs incurred by the Courts as well.
3. Better court management: By unclogging the process that slows justice delivery it can increase the efficiency of courts. As it can ease administrative aspects of justice delivery through smart e-filing, intelligent filtering/prioritization of cases or notifications and tracking of cases.
4. Security of the witnesses: In many cases, the witnesses are not able to come to the court and make their statement as the other party is too strong and scares them of the consequences. e-Courts can help in dealing with such cases.

With the growth in the use of ICT in the justice delivery system concerns like data protection, privacy, biases in decision-making and ethical concerns like whether an AI tool can accomplish the complex Constitutional role of judges etc. are going to pose fresh challenges. So, we need to take certain precautionary steps to regulate the use of new ICT in the justice delivery system.

Precautionary Steps:

1. Ethical & Responsible Use of AI - The government needs to establish a strong governance framework with clear ethical standards and accountability frameworks that will allow AI to flourish and at the same time would ensure that AI models are based on fairness, accountability, transparency and explainability.g. there should be regulatory thresholds based on “how much compute goes into a model.”
2. Creation of well-labelled data - sets - The relevance of AI in justice delivery will be dependent on the availability of clear and well-labelled data sets. Thus humans have to be kept in the loop to create robust necessary labelled data sets to prevent data and design biases.
3. Creating decision support systems - AI systems should be used to assist justice decision-making but we should not completely replace human decision-making. So, such tools should be designed and deployed to be used as decision aids, whose outputs are factored into consideration for human decision-making.
4. Data Protection Law - The Parliament needs to fill in the regulatory vacuum by bringing in place the data protection law to address the issues of data protection and privacy.

So as we are increasingly adopting new ICT in justice delivery systems, we need to take these above-mentioned steps to ensure the responsible use of AI and data privacy along with enhancing the efficiency of our justice delivery system.