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Indian Express
18-05-2025
- Business
- Indian Express
Justice at your fingertips: How AI is helping Delhi's judges, lawyers deal with caseload
A huge backlog of cases, shortage of judges, staff, and even chambers for advocates to work out of — it's no secret that Delhi's courts are overburdened. Sample this. – In Delhi's lower courts, there are nearly 15 lakh pending cases — 12.9 lakh criminal and 2.13 lakh civil, according to data available on the National Judicial Datagrid. – The Delhi High Court has less than one judge per 10 lakh population, according to the India Justice Report 2025 by Tata Trusts, which analyses the criminal justice system. – Close to three-quarters of the prisoners in India are undertrials, and the fate of over 50 million cases remains undecided. As things stand, it will take over 300 years to clear the current backlog of cases. With courtrooms bogged down with manual processes and delays, is there a solution to this legal tangle? Artificial Intelligence (AI) could provide one. From AI-driven speech recognition software designed to assist court stenographers in transcribing witness examinations and orders dictated by judges to applications designed to streamline workflow, AI has been slowly transforming the judicial system in the country. While leaving the delivery of justice to the judges, it can automate all other processes that are too cumbersome for people. Utkarsh Saxena, a lawyer since 2012, has co-founded one such firm that has come to the aid of the court. Called Adalat AI, it provides machine learning-powered solutions to courts in India in their attempt to tackle widespread backlogs and delays. Saxena, who is also the firm's CEO, said, '… Sometimes judges have to write their order manually… It's a lot of paperwork. Some told us that they feel like their board exams are still going on.' He used to be a clerk with a justice of the Supreme Court of India. 'A large part of the problem of delay is caused not due to questions of law but those of logistics… our goal is to eliminate that. Tools can run in the background to quicken the slow processes, and at the same time, judges can focus on delivering justice,' he added. With the Adalat AI application, all judges need to do is login, press two buttons, and speak out their observations. All their observations are automatically transcribed — legal jargon included — and voila! An order is automatically prepared. While other speech-to-text applications exist, what separates Adalat AI from the rest is that it has been extensively trained on Indian legal jargon, Indian accents, and pronunciation. The advanced algorithm is calibrated using legal terms sourced from over 1 lakh court orders in 11 local languages. The app also has a case flow management dashboard (analogous to a digital version of a cause list) that helps in streamlining workflows. All the judge needs to do is dictate his order, and it is converted automatically into the printed order. After the judge finishes dictating orders for the day, they can download them — all of which are converted into ZIP files. The application is currently being used in 8 states and 3,000 courtrooms across the country — Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Bihar, Odisha, Haryana and Punjab. It aims to expand its reach to 50% of all courtrooms in the country by 2025. 'Adalat AI is also a part of the training curriculum at judicial academies,' Arghya Bhattacharya, co-founder of the firm, told The Indian Express. He is an AI and machine learning engineer. 'We have a tight feedback loop. What we're building is for the system and also with the system. We have WhatsApp communities which enable judges or court staff to report any bugs in our application,' he added. Adalat AI also allows scanning and converting legal documents into digital records instantly. 'Our end goal is to liberate the justice system from manual clerical work,' said Bhattacharya. At Delhi's lower courts, the AI software is being rolled out. Staff seem to be relieved that, in the future, it could help reduce their workload. 'Just look at these trunks,' said a court staff member working in a Delhi court, referring to the case files inside. 'Is there a need to have so many files? Half our time goes into sorting them out,' the staffer added. 'I think files should be digitised to the maximum extent possible.' Speaking at an event in July 2024 during which Adalat AI was inaugurated in Delhi's district Courts, the then Delhi High Court Chief Justice — now SC Judge — Manmohan had said, 'The biggest problem I see judges facing is that there is a large demand for stenographers, but there's not a large pool available. I think this app will solve that problem to a large extent… it will ensure [by transcribing orders] that a large pool of stenographers will become available for other purposes.' 'Their team has done a fantastic job… this is the right application of technology,' he had added. Along with judges, litigants, and stenographers, lawyers have also started relying on AI. 'I sometimes use an AI application to help me cull out important bits from judgments,' said advocate Vivek Chandra Jaiswal. 'I just upload the PDFs and it gives me all the important portions. I've even used these arguments in court at times.' One such application is 'Ask Junior', designed by advocate Renu Gupta. This AI tool concisely summarises judgments and court decisions. The tool also releases a monthly digest of summaries of Supreme Court judgments to aid advocates. Gupta told The Indian Express, 'We take a multi-step approach to generating our summaries. First, we parse each judgment and extract key components — facts, legal issues, arguments, reasoning, and the ratio decidendi. Then, we distill these into a short, accessible summary that captures the core legal reasoning without losing depth.' 'We've collected all publicly available Supreme Court judgments and used them to train our models, which are continuously evaluated using custom metrics developed with inputs from practicing lawyers,' she added. Gupta also said that as of April 30, 2025, AskJunior had summarised 14,823 judgments with a 96.1% accuracy, delivered over 3,00,000 newsletters, and grown to 3,600+ Substack subscribers. The Supreme Court of India has also adopted the use of AI language technology in the translation of judicial documents. Till January 2025, 17 High Courts in the country have started providing online access to judgments in vernacular languages. On the same date, 36,324 Supreme Court judgments were translated into Hindi, and 42,765 judgments had been translated into 17 other regional languages.
Forbes
14-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The Changemakers And Activists On 30 Under 30 Asia Social Impact 2025 List
Forbes Asia With the global AI training dataset market poised for exponential growth over the next decade, social entrepreneur Manu Chopra saw an opportunity to channel some of that wealth to the rural poor. His nonprofit Karya pays villagers, many of them women, $5 an hour or more—roughly 20 times minimum wage—to be recorded speaking in their own language, which can be used by AI apps to understand and generate speech. About 70% of fees paid by its clients, which include the Indian government, U.S. tech giant Google and Indian ride-sharing company Ola, goes to the workers while Karya retains the rest to cover operating costs. Roughly 120 Indian dialects have been recorded so far and Karya says it has expanded into Kenya and Ethiopia. Chopra, CEO, cofounded Karya in 2021 with Vivek Seshadri, chief technology officer, and Safiya Husain, chief impact officer. Chopra's Karya is one example of how AI is being used by this year's Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia: Social Impact listees to create a positive change in their communities. 'To build a future of AI that is diverse and inclusive, we need to employ diverse and underrepresented populations.' The nonprofit has also received grants for research, including $2 million from the Gates Foundation to collect recorded speech from 30,000 rural women to capture their language, syntax and patterns of speech with the aim of combating gender bias in AI. Karya, which in Sanskrit means work that gives one dignity, says its goal is to provide support to half a million disadvantaged people over the next five years. Chopra, who has a bachelor's degree in computer science from Stanford University, notes: 'To build a future of AI that is diverse and inclusive, we need to employ diverse and underrepresented populations.' Forbes Asia Also in India, 26-year-old Arghya Bhattacharya has an ambitious mission: he wants to reduce the case backlogs in the country's clogged courts using AI. Together with Utkarsh Saxena (over 30), they cofounded Adalat AI, which is developing software that can transcribe depositions and take dictation in court. The non-profit says its product has been trained to understand legal jargon and local Indian languages, which helps ensure accuracy. Adalat AI says the software is being used in 3,000 courts across eight Indian states. In addition to AI, social entrepreneurs on this year's list are innovating using various other technologies to create apps and devices to help those with physical and developmental disabilities access therapy and improve their quality of life. Pravin Kumar, 26, founded in 2020 Dextroware Devices, a startup that developed Mouseware, a device worn on the head to control computers and smartphones, for use by people with upper limb disabilities. The startup completed the incubator program at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and in 2023 Mouseware was India's winning entry for the James Dyson design awards. Turzo Bose and Lamia Sreya Rahman, cofounders of Vidi Labs In Hong Kong, Turzo Bose and Lamia Sreya Rahman cofounded Vidi Labs to help the visually impaired move independently using wearable cameras and "seeing" AI. Their company has developed Seekr, a device packed with depth sensors and scene and text recognition technologies to describe surroundings to the wearer. In 2025, Seekr won a CES Innovation Award in the Accessibility & AgeTech category. Also addressing challenges faced by the visually-impaired, Hunny Bhagchandani founded Ahmedabad-based Torchit, a company producing accessibility products. Torchit's flagship product is Saarthi, a cane that "reads" the environment and sends vibrations to warn of potential obstacles. The company's Jyoti AI, smart spectacles interpret text in multiple languages. For neurodivergent people including those with autism, ADHD and dyslexia–who make up an estimated 15% to 20% of the global population–Holly Fowler launched the Wable app, a social network to help them connect. Through Wable they can hook up with potential friends or set up dates; it even has a job board that recommends inclusive workplaces. Available in Australia and New Zealand, Wable plans to expand to the U.S., U.K. and Canada. Prathyusha Potharaju, cofounder of Grailmaker Innovations. Growing up with dyslexia herself, another listee, Prathyusha Potharaju cofounded Grailmaker Innovations to help kids with developmental disabilities access therapy in a more affordable and convenient way. The four-year-old company created Vision Nanny, a low-cost, interactive AI-powered learning software as an at-home therapy tool for children with Cerebral Visual Impairment (CVI). Recently, Potharaju and her team developed Spacefelt, an app that was developed with support from Hyderabad's LV Prasad Eye Institute, to allows the visually impaired navigate their surroundings. The list this year also highlights activists who are championing various social causes including women's rights, education and gender equality. An Afghan refugee in Pakistan, Helai Masudi is cofounder of Speak For Change, a volunteer-led platform which offers educational resources such as entrepreneurship webinars and writing workshops to young women in Afghanistan being denied access to schools by the Taliban. Masudi originally used Telegram groups to offer free online courses, which were expanded into a series profiling inspiring Afghan refugees, who have successful careers. Masudi,also helped coordinate disaster aid after the 2023 earthquake in the Herat Province, was one of the recipients of the Diana Award in 2024. In Nepal, transgender woman Rukshana Kapali is a champion of gender equality, having filed over 50 lawsuits against the government for greater legal recognition of transgender identity. The activist won one case last year, when the Supreme Court ruled that she can be identified legally as a woman, not as a third gender, without having to submit medical verification. Through her nonprofit Queer Youth Group, Kapali provides legal assistance to people fighting for their gender rights. —Additional Reporting by Anuradha Raghunathan Read our complete Social Impact list here – and be sure to check out our full Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2025 coverage here.
