e-Court Case Status Check

What is the eCourts case status service?

eCourts case status is the public case-tracking service of the Indian judiciary, run by the e-Committee, Supreme Court of India and hosted and maintained by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. It puts the live record of cases in District and Taluka Courts and in High Courts on a public website that anyone can search without logging in and without paying anything.

The eCourts hub at ecourts.gov.in links to a family of separate portals, and knowing which one you need saves a lot of time:

The eCourts services interface is published in six languages; English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada and Tamil.

Who can use eCourts case status, and who cannot?

You can use the service if:

• You are a litigant, petitioner, plaintiff, complainant, respondent, defendant, appellant, accused or extra party; in any case before a District, Taluka or High Court covered by eCourts.
• You are an advocate, and want to pull the full list of cases registered against your name in a court complex.
• You are a relative, employer, journalist, researcher or law student with no connection to the case. eCourts case status is open public data; there is no requirement to prove any interest in the matter.

You cannot use this service if:

• You want Supreme Court of India case status. The Supreme Court runs its own case-status service on sci.gov.in and is not searchable through the District or High Court eCourts portals.
• You want status of a consumer commission, tribunal, or quasi-judicial forum case. Consumer cases are on e-jagriti.gov.in, and most tribunals run separate portals of their own.
• You expect to see sealed, in-camera or protected-identity matters in full. Courts routinely mask party names in POCSO, matrimonial and similar categories, and those details are not published.
• You are looking for a certified copy. Downloads from eCourts are informational only and are not admissible as certified copies.

How to check e-Court case status online

1. Open ecourts.gov.in and, under the Services block, choose District Court Services for a trial-court case or High Court Services for a High Court case.
2. If you have the CNR, keep CNR Number selected in the Search Menu on the left, type the 16-digit alphanumeric CNR without any hyphen or space (the portal's own example is MHAU019999992015), enter the captcha and press Search.
3. If you do not have the CNR, click Case Status in the Search Menu, then select your State, District and Court Complex from the three dropdowns.
4. Pick the search tab that matches what you know, Party Name, Case Number, Filing Number, Advocate, FIR Number, Act or Case Type.
5. For a party-name search, enter at least 3 characters of the name (any part of it works, "Ramesh", "Narayan" or even "Nar" for Ramesh Narayan Yadav), enter the case registration year, and choose Pending, Disposed or Both if you are unsure.
6. Type the 5-character alphanumeric captcha and click Go.
7. From the results list, click View next to the matching case to open the case history, parties, advocates, acts and sections, first hearing date, next hearing date, the purpose of each hearing, interim orders and, if disposed, the disposal date and nature.
8. Note the CNR number shown at the top of the case history and save it. Every future check takes ten seconds with the CNR.

How to check case status by SMS or mobile app

1. Send an SMS reading ECOURTS to 9766899899 from any mobile phone. The current status comes back by reply SMS. This route needs no internet connection.
2. Install the eCourts Services App, published for Android on Google Play and for iOS on the App Store, both linked from ecourts.gov.in.
3. In the app, search by CNR or by case number and add the case to your personal list, so you can reopen it without retyping anything.

What else can you look up on the eCourts services portal?

The Search Menu on the District and High Court service portals carries seven options, and case status is only one of them:

• CNR Number: direct lookup of a single case.
• Case Status — search by party, case number, filing number, advocate, FIR, act or case type.
• Court Orders, interim and final orders passed in a case.
• Cause List, the day's list of cases before each court, published a day in advance, which tells you whether your matter is actually listed tomorrow.
• Caveat Search, whether a caveat has been lodged, so that you are heard before any ex-parte order.
• Process Details. The status of summons and notices issued in the case.
• Location; court complex addresses and jurisdiction details.

How much does eCourts case status cost?

Nothing. Searching case status, viewing case history, reading cause lists and downloading orders and judgments from the eCourts portals is free of cost, and none of it requires an account, a password or a document upload. The only money that changes hands on the eCourts family of sites is on pay.ecourts.gov.in, where you pay a court fee, fine, penalty or judicial deposit that the court itself has levied, and that money goes to the court, not to the portal.

This matters because a large market of "case status agents" and lookalike apps charges people ₹100 to ₹1,000 for a printout of information that eCourts gives away. No agent, no cyber café operator and no mobile app has any privileged access to court data. If someone offers to "get your case status faster", they are simply typing the same CNR into the same free website. Equally, no genuine court official will ask for an OTP, a UPI payment or a "case listing fee" over the phone. Use only ecourts.gov.in and the portals it links to.

Why an eCourts search fails, and how to fix it

• Wrong court complex. A district often has several court complexes, and a case filed in one will not show under another. Try each complex in the dropdown.
• Wrong registration year. The year in the search box is the case registration year, not the year the incident happened or the year of the next hearing.
• Name spelt differently on record. Court records may carry an initial, a father's name, or a different transliteration. Search on the shortest distinctive fragment of the name, minimum three characters.
• Case searched under the wrong status. If you do not know whether the case is live, choose Both rather than Pending.
• Filing number instead of case number. Before registration, a matter carries only a filing number. Use the Filing Number tab for freshly filed cases.
• Data not yet uploaded by the court. Case data flows from each court's own Case Information System, and there can be a lag, especially for very new filings and for recently digitised old records.

How to get help with eCourts

• e-Committee, Supreme Court of India: ecommittee[at]aij[dot]gov[dot]in
• High Court Central Project Coordinators: the eCourts Contact Us page lists a dedicated CPC email for every High Court, for example cpc-all[at]aij[dot]gov[dot]in (Allahabad), cpc-bom[at]aij[dot]gov[dot]in (Bombay), cpc-cal[at]aij[dot]gov[dot]in (Calcutta), cpc-del[at]aij[dot]gov[dot]in (Delhi), cpc-mp[at]aij[dot]gov[dot]in (Madhya Pradesh) and cpc-tn[at]aij[dot]gov[dot]in (Madras, covering Tamil Nadu and Puducherry).
• Help videos and manuals: linked in the footer of every eCourts services page, including a step-by-step video for each search type.

According to the eCourts portal, any query or issue about the availability or updation of case data should go to the Central Project Coordinator of the High Court having jurisdiction over that court, because case data is generated and corrected by the courts themselves, not by the national portal.

Who is eligible

eCourts case status has no eligibility gate in the usual sense: it is open public data with no login, no fee and no proof of interest required. Use this checklist to confirm you are searching the right service.

You can search eCourts if you are:

• A litigant, petitioner, plaintiff, respondent, defendant, appellant, accused, complainant or any other party named in a District, Taluka or High Court case
• An advocate looking up cases filed for a client, or every case listed against your own name in a court complex
• A relative, employer, surety, or guarantor tracking a case you have a personal stake in
• A journalist, researcher, law student, RTI applicant or member of the general public with no personal connection to the case at all
• Located anywhere in India or abroad; there is no residency or citizenship requirement

eCourts cannot help you if:

• The case is before the Supreme Court of India; that is tracked separately on sci.gov.in, not on the District or High Court eCourts portals
• The matter is before a consumer commission (use e-jagriti.gov.in) or a specialised tribunal such as NCLT, CAT or an income-tax tribunal, most of which run their own case-tracking portals
• You need the full, unmasked party names in a POCSO, matrimonial, rape or similar sensitive-category case; courts mask identifying details in these categories by design
• You need a certified copy of an order or judgment for submission elsewhere; eCourts downloads are informational copies only, and a certified copy must come from the court's own copying section
• The case was filed very recently and the court's Case Information System has not yet uploaded it; this is a timing gap, not an eligibility bar, and it resolves once the court updates its records

How to apply

There is nothing to "apply" for since case status is a free lookup, but first-time users get the fastest results by choosing the right access channel before they start searching, rather than discovering midway that they picked the wrong one.

1. Identify the court type first. Decide whether the case is in a District/Taluka Court or a High Court. This determines whether you need services.ecourts.gov.in or hcservices.ecourts.gov.in; picking the wrong one is the single most common reason a genuine case appears to be "not found."
2. Gather whichever identifier you already have, in order of usefulness: the 16-digit CNR number is fastest, followed by the case number and year, then the party name and year, then the advocate name, then the FIR number, police station and year. You only need one of these, not all.
3. Choose your channel based on access to a smartphone or computer. If you have internet access, use the website or the eCourts Services App. If you only have a basic phone, use the SMS route (send "ECOURTS" plus your CNR number to 9766899899). If you have neither and no CNR yet, go in person.
4. For an in-person or offline route, visit the e-Seva Kendra (litigant facilitation counter) set up at most court complexes under the eCourts Mission Mode Project, or ask the court's filing/reader section for the case number allotted when the case was filed. Court staff at these counters can look up the CNR on your behalf and print or note it down for you.
5. Once you have the CNR for the first time, record it somewhere permanent. The CNR does not change even if the case is transferred to a different court or bench, so every future check, whether by website, app or SMS, becomes a ten-second lookup instead of a fresh search.
6. Set up the mobile app if you expect to track the case over months or years. Install the eCourts Services App from Google Play or the App Store, add the case to your saved list using the CNR, and reopen it any time without retyping the case details.

Common reasons for rejection

An eCourts search does not "reject" an application in the way a benefit scheme does, but a genuine, existing case can still fail to appear, or can appear to give an incomplete or misleading result, for specific and fixable reasons beyond the basic wrong-complex or wrong-year mistakes.

• Old CNR format entered for a case migrated to the new 16-digit standard. Some cases digitised in the early phase of the eCourts project carried a shorter or differently structured identifier before the current 16-digit alphanumeric CNR became standard. Fix: search by party name and year instead, then note the current CNR shown in the result for future use.
• Case transferred between courts after the CNR was first issued. A transfer order (for territorial jurisdiction, from a subordinate court to a special court, or on judicial reassignment) can leave the case listed under a new court complex in the system even though the CNR itself stays the same. Fix: if the CNR search returns nothing, repeat the case-number or party-name search under the court complex the case may have moved to.
• High Court portal searched for a District Court case, or the reverse. Because services.ecourts.gov.in and hcservices.ecourts.gov.in are separate systems with separate databases, a correct CNR entered on the wrong one of the two returns no result at all rather than a "wrong portal" message. Fix: confirm from the case papers or the advocate whether the matter is before a District/Taluka Court or a High Court before searching.
• Captcha or CNR entered with a stray hyphen, space, or the letter O in place of the digit zero. The portal's own guidance is to type the CNR with no punctuation; a single mis-keyed character returns a blank result that looks identical to "case not found." Fix: retype carefully from a clean copy of the CNR, and use the copy-paste function where the portal allows it.
• Sealed or in-camera case category. For POCSO, matrimonial and a few other protected categories, the system deliberately withholds or masks party names and some case details from public search, even though the case exists and is otherwise active. Fix: this is by design and is not an error; the parties themselves or their advocate can get full details through the court directly rather than through the public portal.
• Case data simply not yet uploaded by the originating court. Each court's own Case Information System pushes data to the national eCourts database, and very recent filings or older records that are still being digitised can lag by days or longer. Fix: wait a few days and retry, or raise it with the Central Project Coordinator of the concerned High Court if the case still does not appear after a reasonable interval.