How to check a court case status in India

Start with the eCourts services portal, which covers district courts and high courts across the country. If you have the CNR, use it — the search is exact and instant.

If you do not have the CNR, search by case number, which requires the case type, the number and the year, and the correct court complex. Case type matters: a criminal case, a civil suit and a claim petition are separate series and the same number exists in each.

If you do not have the case number either, search by party name. Enter the surname and the year, select the court establishment, and expect several results — this search is broad and the state's naming conventions may differ from the spelling you use. Try the alternate spelling.

If a criminal case is what you are following, search by FIR number. This is the most useful route for a complainant, because you always know the FIR number and police station even when you have no idea what the case was numbered when it reached court.

Advocate name and advocate registration number search exists as well, which is how you find every matter your own lawyer is running for you if you have lost track.

For a Supreme Court matter, use the Supreme Court's own portal, which has its own case status, daily orders, judgments and cause list searches. The district and high court portal will not find a Supreme Court case.

Once you find the case, write down the CNR and keep it. Every subsequent check becomes a single lookup, and the CNR survives everything that will otherwise break your search.

The case details screen shows the filing and registration numbers, the case type, the parties, the advocates, the court and judge it is before, and the current status — pending or disposed.

The two fields that matter for planning are the next hearing date and the purpose of that hearing. Purpose is the field people ignore and should not: 'for appearance', 'for evidence', 'for arguments', 'for judgment' and 'for compliance' describe completely different stages, and a case listed for appearance for the fifth time is a case that is not moving for a reason worth asking about.

The history of hearings lists each previous date, the judge, and what happened. Read it backwards. A long series of adjournments with the same purpose usually means service has not been completed on one party, or a document has not been filed, and it is often something your side can fix.

Orders on each date are available where the court has uploaded them, and these are the actual record of what was decided rather than a summary. Download them as they appear — the interim order granting or refusing something is frequently the practically decisive event in a case that will not be finally decided for years.

Where the matter is disposed, the screen shows the disposal date and nature — decided, dismissed, withdrawn, transferred, compromised. Disposal is not the same as conclusion: an appeal, an execution petition or a revision may follow and will carry its own number.

The cause list tells you which matters are listed before which judge on a given day and in what order. The item number is the practical information — a matter at item eighty is unlikely to be reached in the morning session.

The National Judicial Data Grid publishes aggregate pendency by court, case age and case type. It will not tell you about your case, but it will tell you honestly what the realistic timeline looks like in that court for that kind of matter, which is information most litigants never see.

Save the CNR somewhere permanent — a note, a document, anywhere you will still find it in three years. It is the only identifier that survives.

Use the eCourts mobile application, which does the same searches and lets you save cases to a personal list so you can check all of them at once instead of searching each time.

Register for alerts where the court establishment offers them, so that a change of date reaches you rather than requiring you to look.

Check before every listed date rather than relying on what you were told at the last hearing. Dates change, judges change, and a matter can be advanced or adjourned without anyone telling the parties.

Download each order when it appears rather than assuming it will still be there. Availability varies between establishments and periods.

If the case does not appear at all, the likely explanations are that it was filed very recently and has not been digitised, that it is before a tribunal or a forum outside the eCourts system, or that you have the wrong court establishment. Tribunals — consumer, motor accident, tax, company — sit outside the district court structure in varying degrees and several run their own portals.

If a case genuinely cannot be traced and you are a party to it, the court's filing counter or the copying section can locate it from the filing details, and that is a routine request rather than an imposition.

The eCourts judgments portal carries judgments and orders of the Supreme Court and High Courts, searchable by court, bench, judge, party, date and free text. This is the route for finding a decision when you know something about it but not its citation.

The Supreme Court publishes its own judgments, daily orders and cause lists, and maintains a reports repository for the official reported series. For a Supreme Court decision, that is the authoritative source rather than any commercial database.

Understand the difference between what you can download and what a court will accept. A copy downloaded from a portal is a copy for information. A certified copy, issued by the court's copying section against an application and a fee, is what you file, produce, or rely on in another proceeding.

Apply for a certified copy through the copying section of the court concerned, or online where the establishment offers it. It takes days rather than minutes and you should apply as soon as you know you will need it, not on the day.

For a matter you are not party to, a certified copy generally requires an application stating your interest, and the court decides. Case status and uploaded orders remain publicly viewable regardless.

Some categories are deliberately restricted. Matters involving children, sexual offences and family disputes are anonymised or withheld, and that is a protection rather than an omission.

Where you need help using any of this, legal services authorities provide free legal advice and representation to eligible categories, and they sit inside the court complexes rather than somewhere separate. The legal aid clinic at a district court will look up a case for someone who cannot do it themselves.

It will not tell you whether your case is strong. Status data is procedural, and a case can be listed regularly and be going nowhere, or be adjourned repeatedly and be about to be decided.

It will not tell you what happened in court beyond the recorded purpose and the uploaded order. Oral observations, indications from the bench and the reason an adjournment was granted are not captured, and they are frequently the most important information of the day.

It will not tell you about tribunal proceedings that sit outside the eCourts structure, or about matters at the pre-litigation stage — a complaint with the police, a notice served, or a conciliation in progress.

It will not distinguish between a disposal that ended the dispute and one that merely moved it. A suit decided in the district court is followed by an appeal with a new number in a different court, and the original CNR shows only disposal.

It will not correct a wrongly recorded party name or a wrong date. Those are errors in the court record and are corrected by an application to the court, not by the portal.

And it will not warn you about limitation. The period for filing an appeal or a revision runs from the date of the order, not from the date you noticed it, and a case you stopped checking is the classic way a right of appeal is lost.

For anything that turns on the exact contents of an order, read the order. For anything that turns on what to do next, take advice — free if you qualify, and available inside the same building as the case.