Virtual Hearings After the Pandemic: What Stuck and What Reverted

In the space of a few weeks in 2020, Indian courts did something that decades of committee reports had not achieved: they moved a substantial part of their working life onto video. It was done under pressure, with improvised infrastructure, and it worked well enough that the system kept functioning through a period when the alternative was not functioning at all.

What happened afterwards is less discussed and more interesting. The emergency ended, physical hearings resumed, and a genuine question was left unanswered: what should video hearings be for, now that they are not a substitute for closure? Different courts answered that question differently, at different speeds, and mostly without announcing that they were answering it. The result is a patchwork that redistributes access to justice geographically, and the profession has adapted to it without quite noticing what it adapted to.

How Video Hearings Became Lawful, Quickly

The legal foundation was laid in April 2020, when the Supreme Court, exercising its powers under Article 142, issued directions in a suo motu proceeding on court functioning through video conferencing. The order did two things. It confirmed that hearings conducted by video conferencing were lawful court proceedings, and it directed High Courts to frame the modalities for their own courts and for the district judiciary under them.

That second direction is the source of everything that followed, including the fragmentation. Rather than a single national rulebook, the position became a set of rules framed court by court. The e-Committee of the Supreme Court prepared model video conferencing rules to guide that exercise, and a number of High Courts adopted rules closely based on the model. Others framed their own. The practical consequence is that the answer to what can be done by video is a question about a specific court's current rules and standing orders, not a question about India.

It is worth pausing on how unusual this was. A significant procedural change was implemented across the entire judiciary in weeks, without amending the procedural codes, on the authority of a constitutional court's direction and the rule-making power of the High Courts. Whatever else is true, the system demonstrated that it can move fast when it decides to.

What Stuck

Some of the change was permanent, and it is worth naming precisely rather than gesturing at.

What Reverted, and Why

The default reverted to physical hearing almost everywhere, and the reasons are not mysterious or improper. They deserve to be stated fairly, because the argument for physical hearings is stronger than technology enthusiasts usually allow.

• Argument is harder on video. Sustained oral argument, with a bench interrupting, testing propositions and reading from the record, loses something on a video link. Counsel report it, judges report it, and the point is not sentimental.
• Open court is a constitutional value, not an aesthetic one. A hearing conducted in a room the public may enter is different from one conducted through a link. Live streaming addresses part of this and does not address all of it.
• Connectivity is unequal and the failure is asymmetric. When a link drops, it drops for the party with the weaker connection, and that party is systematically the less resourced one. A technical failure in a hearing is not neutral in its effects.
• Court craft depends on presence. A great deal of what happens in a court happens around the hearing: reading the board, waiting, settling matters in the corridor, seeing which way a bench is moving in the matter before yours. None of this survives a link.
• Discipline and decorum are harder to maintain. Courts spent a period dealing with participants appearing from unsuitable settings, and rules had to be framed about it.
• Institutional preference. Some courts simply prefer physical hearing, and the preference of the court is, in the end, a legitimate input into how the court works.

None of these arguments is bad. What is unsatisfactory is that the reversion happened largely by default rather than by decision, so the trade-offs were never weighed openly against what remote access made possible.

Who Gained Access, and Who Lost It Again

This is the part that deserves more attention than it gets. Remote hearing is not a neutral convenience. It redistributes access, and the redistribution runs along geographic and economic lines.

The Current Patchwork, and How to Find Out Where You Stand

There is no single answer to whether you can appear by video in an Indian court, and any article that gives you one is out of date. The position varies by court, by category of matter, sometimes by bench, and it changes by standing order more often than by rule amendment.

What does not change is where to look. That is a more useful thing to know than any snapshot.

The Consequence for Records and Data

There is a quieter effect that matters for anyone working with court data. A hearing conducted remotely leaves the same record as any other hearing: an order, a next date, a cause list entry. It does not leave a marker saying it happened by video. Very little of the shift to hybrid working is visible in judicial data at all.

That has two implications. First, the empirical question of whether hybrid hearings changed anything measurable, in adjournment rates, in disposal, in who appears, is much harder to answer than it should be, because the mode of hearing is not a recorded field. Second, the practical dependence on cause lists went up rather than down. When appearance is remote, the cause list is not a document you check on the way into court. It is the only thing telling you whether to be at a screen at all, and supplementary lists that appear late are correspondingly more consequential.

The move to hybrid hearings changed how the profession works and left almost no trace in the data. What cannot be measured tends to be argued about with anecdotes.

That dependence on listing information is one of the reasons CourtMesh puts cause list and case status information alongside the judgment corpus rather than treating them as separate concerns. One unified search runs across the Supreme Court, all twenty-five High Courts, the district judiciary and tribunals including NCLT, NCLAT, ITAT and CESTAT, sourced only from official government portals. If your working assumption is that you will appear remotely, the cost of finding out late that your matter was listed is higher than it used to be.

The Decision Nobody Took

The unsatisfying part of this story is that the most important question was never really put. Video hearings arrived as an emergency measure. They were kept, in varying degrees, because the infrastructure existed and some uses were obviously sensible. They were rolled back, in varying degrees, because physical hearing is what courts are used to.

What did not happen, at national level, is a deliberate assessment of which categories of proceeding are better conducted remotely, which are not, and what the access consequences of each choice are for people who live far from a High Court. Phase III of the eCourts programme contemplates expanded virtual capability, which is the right frame, but capability is not policy. The policy question remains open, and while it stays open the answer will keep being decided court by court, quietly, by administrative practice.

For practitioners the takeaway is unglamorous but actionable. Do not assume. Check the current rules and circulars of the court you are in, for the category of matter you have, before you plan a hearing around a screen. And keep watching the cause list more carefully than you used to, because in a hybrid world it is the only thing that tells you where you are supposed to be.