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Passport To Justice: Can AI Help Cut Pendency Dramatically? An Argentinian software suggests how India’s courts can work as smoothly as its passport offices Anuj Gupta new types of cases. This is critical to ensure that the software evolves as With nearly 5 crore cases pending, the

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Passport To Justice: Can AI Help Cut Pendency Dramatically?

An Argentinian software suggests how India’s courts can work as smoothly as its passport offices

Anuj Gupta

new types of cases.

  • This is critical to ensure that the software evolves as With nearly 5 crore cases pending, the

Indian legal system is almost changing

new judges and case law arise.

The success rates are stupendous to say the least. By

the way society behaves. Why bother

looking at more than 3 lakh past judgments, Prometea

waiting for 20 years in the court to get

can predict a judgment in 20 seconds with 96% accuracy. compensation for a road accident, you

might as well use might is right on the

3 the judge has to just sign. Prometea operates on the road itself. In this context there is huge scope for

utilising a key pillar of the Fourth Industrial entirerange of court process right from filing (litigants

can call in and file cases using voice recognition) Revolution for ensuring timely justice for all: Artificial

Intelligence. This is even as the less-than-a-month-old

and scheduling (accurate prioritisation of critical

¿ cases) to verdict creation. Without Prometea it took ChatGPT software is threatening to dethrone the

Google search engine.

83 days to produce 1,000 rulings. With Prometea, it was

Most of the pending cases are also small and

done in5days.

A full-scale porting of such softwares to India repetitive cases which primarily impact the poor and

can be fast-tracked. Indeed, although the current

I can significantly alleviate the problem of judicial

pendency. Prometea has a high success rate in cases

logjam appears hopeless, India has faced and resolved

It has been implemented in the Inter-American

similar issues in other areas using technology.

involving common tenancy, tax, guardianship etc

Court of Human Rights (with more than 25 countries), that are the very cases which primarily clog the • A passport office is a case in point, which around a the constitutional court of Colombia as well as various Indian courtsystem. decade ago used to give nightmares with serpentine

queues and inordinate delays. courts in Argentina. It has been anaylsed favourably by I have initiated discussions with Prometea’s

the UN, Organisation of American States, University of

  • While the same passport officer sits in the passport

Oxford and University of Milan among others. It has creator Juan Gustavo Corvalan, to explore doing

somethingfor Indialike he has done for Colombia and

office approving the passport today, everything three primary components:

Costa Rica. However, the judiciary in India may be else around him has been digitised, resulting in

unprecedented levels of efficiency. • First, a “talkable” user-friendly interface with natu- too busy protecting its turf on appointments to move

ral language processor for audio or text inputs, so rapidly on this front.

  • Now the passport officer’s role is mostly approving that it can be used by a clerk as well as by a judge.

This is why it is incumbent on the private sector to

or rejecting the passport.

  • Prometea can thus be asked to apply a certain model,
  • Similarly, software systems are now available that cite a particular law, search for precedents, create

design tools like Prometea.

can help reduce the role of the judge to just choosing reports and graphs, provide solutions, send notifi- • Do you think one can predict the average compen-

sation possible if your car is hit by another car? Yes!

among options for the ruling and sign!

cations, do deep internet search etc.

  • The entire court complex can be digitised – taking
  • Second, expert automation to draft judgments and • Can we estimate the average credit card debt

settlement based on past history? Yes!

away the process of filing, scheduling, prioritising provide recommendations.

Such information will be very valuable in the

and even making the judgment.

  • To prevent misuse. Prometea uses ‘No black bOX AIR

In particular; there is Argentina’s Prometea

market and can help mediate and close such cases

meaning that the Al analysis is transparent and quickly. The opportunity to correct India’s abysmal software that was developed through the University of clear about the parameters and assumptions, and record in judicial pendency lies in the hands of the Buenos Aires in partnership with the public prosecu-

tor and the constitutional court. This has now been

the logic of its algorithms is traceable.

private sector now.

  • Third, machine learning for improving accuracy

widely implemented and thus has wide acceptability.

and reducing time in the future and to adapt to The writer is an IIT and IIM graduate and a

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