Our approach

The court exists to serve the litigant.

Every system gets designed around whoever it treats as its primary user. For decades, India’s courts have been designed, measured and reformed around the institution itself: its cause lists, its disposal counts, its pendency figures. The litigant, the person the whole apparatus supposedly exists for, appears in that picture only as a unit of backlog.

PUCAR starts from the opposite premise. The litigant is the primary user of the court, and the court is a service that exists to resolve their dispute. That is not a slogan: it is a design constraint. It means every process, every hearing, every notice is judged by one question: what did this cost the person waiting for justice, and what did it move forward for them?

Taking that lens seriously changes what you measure. Pendency is a system-centric metric: it tells you how burdened the institution is, not how any person inside it is faring. A court can improve its numbers while every litigant in it still runs pillar to post. So we measure the litigant’s experience instead, along three pillars: is the journey seamless, is it efficient, and is it predictable?

The metrics that matter

From pendency to people.

System-centric metrics ask how the institution is doing. Litigant-centric metrics ask how the person is doing. The difference decides what gets fixed.

What the metric asksHow many cases does the system hold?How long does one person wait?

What a hearing meansA line in the cause listA day of wages, travel and waiting

What success looks likeClearance rates and disposal countsA journey that is seamless, efficient and predictable

Seamlessness

A litigant should experience one continuous journey, not a relay of disconnected offices. The court is digitally connected to police, post and treasury, so summons, fees and processes move between institutions without the litigant carrying paper from counter to counter. Filing happens from anywhere, registration follows the same day, and mediation is available at any stage without leaving the process.

Same dayfiling to registration at the ON Court. The conventional process takes 10 days

Efficiency

Efficiency here is measured in the litigant’s time, not the court’s throughput. Asynchronous proceedings mean key case actions happen without everyone travelling to stand in the same room: no roll calls, no appearances that exist only to fix the next date. Every hearing that does happen moves the case forward.

164 daysmedian filing to disposal, in 7 hearings. The conventional baseline is about 2 years

Predictability

The quiet cruelty of the conventional process is not knowing: whether the hearing will happen, what comes next, how long anything takes. The ON Court reaches out first, with SMS alerts that tell litigants where their case stands and what to do next, and a schedule that holds.

98%hearings held as scheduled, against a conventional baseline of 40%

Proof points from the ON Court in Kollam: the public dashboard (July 2026) and PUCAR baseline studies of the conventional Sec 138 process.

Our unit of change is a case type

Most reform picks a court, a state or a policy as its unit and improves it a few percent at a time. PUCAR’s unit of change is a dispute type. We take one kind of case and redesign its entire journey, from the moment a dispute arises to the day it is resolved, across process, technology, rules and behaviour at once. A whole journey transformed for one case type beats a marginal gain spread thinly across all of them: it produces a working court people can see, use and demand elsewhere.

Select

Choose a dispute type with high pendency, low legal complexity, a diverse litigant base, and room for focused change management.

Transform

Re-engineer the entire experience of that dispute type: process, technology, rules and behaviour, end to end.

Enable

Scale the transformation across courts in the state, and build the enablers: policy, infrastructure, capacity.

Extend

Carry the learnings and the reusable capabilities to the next dispute type, and begin again.

Why we started with cheque dishonour

The first case type had to be chosen carefully: common enough to matter, simple enough to transform, and contained enough to manage. Cheque dishonour cases under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act fit on every count. They make up roughly 10% of India’s criminal pendency, so the volume is enormous. Their legal structure is simple, with clear constituent elements and a well-defined process, which makes them ideal for rule-based redesign. Their litigants are everyone: individuals, small businesses, large corporates. And they can be routed to a dedicated special court, so the whole transformation can be managed, measured and proven in one place.

That proof now exists. The 24x7 ON Court in Kollam has taken the conventional 600-day Sec 138 journey down to a median of 164 days, and the learnings and reusable capabilities are ready to extend to the next case type.

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