JusticeTech as the Missing Layer of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure

Introduction

Digital Public Infrastructure, or DPI, refers to shared digital systems that are secure, interoperable, and designed as foundational building blocks for public and private service delivery. DPI has changed the way citizens in India receive identity, payments and official records. Platforms for digital identity, real time payments, and document verification have now been extensively cited as international models of how public digital systems can provide inclusion and efficiency on a population scale.

This transformation, however, has been uneven across state functions. Though welfare delivery, banking and access to services have been transformed by DPI, the justice system remains largely an operation of legacy and disjointed digital tools. This is not a marginal omission. Justice is a fundamental role in the state, which is the center of democratic legitimacy, the economy, and citizens’ trust. The lack of justice observed in the DPI model of India demonstrates that there is a gap in the way digital governance has been conceptualised.

This blog examines that gap through an analytical lens. It argues that JusticeTech represents the missing layer in India’s DPI architecture, not as a proposed solution set, but as an underdeveloped domain of public digital infrastructure.

DPI and the Functions It Has Prioritised

India’s DPI initiatives focused early on state functions that were high volume, rule based, and capable of standardisation. Digital identity systems addressed verification failures at scale. Payment infrastructure replaced slow and fragmented financial rails. Document platforms enabled verifiable records without repeated physical submission.

Research on DPI consistently notes that its defining feature is not digitisation alone, but abstraction. A public function is converted into a common, reusable digital layer governed by rules rather than discretion. When this abstraction is attained then scale and interoperability come next.

Justice did not easily lend itself to this model. Legal decision making involves interpretation, discretion, and context. Outcomes are reasoned rather than executed. Jurisdiction is dispersed across courts, tribunals, and administrative bodies. As a result, justice was largely left out of the first generation of DPI thinking.

Structural Characteristics of the Justice System

Justice systems are unique to other functions of the state in their effect on the digital development. They depend on the discretionary reasoning as opposed to the deterministic outputs. They involve multiple institutions exercising overlapping authority. Procedures vary significantly across forums, even when governed by the same statute. Decisions should be justified in writing and are subject to appeal.

These attributes have influenced the application of technology in the justice industry. Digital programs have been majorly geared towards enhancing access and visibility. Portals used in filing, dashboard monitoring of case status, virtual hearings eliminate litigant and court transaction costs. Nevertheless, they do not interfere with the internal design of the way of decision-making.

Courts statistics indicate empirically that pendency of cases is high and disproportionate in jurisdiction, irrespective of digitisation. The fact that long pending cases exist despite lack of barriers of filing or access implies that delays are not the main factor brought about by long pending cases. They have a greater connection with the processing, prioritisation and decision-making in institutions.

Justice Beyond the Courts

The other serious characteristic of the Indian justice scenario is that adjudication does not occur in constitutional courts in majority of cases. Disputes regarding the ownership of land, taxation, social security, environmental regulation, licensing, procurement and public services are addressed by administrative and quasi judicial bodies. These are the decisions that have a direct impact on livelihoods, values of assets and business certainty.

Although they are very important, such forums are poorly standardised and digitised. Studies on administrative justice in India point to some recurring phenomena that include inconsistency in reasoning, absence of detailed orders. The results of these are seldom explained by law deficiencies. They can better be described as effects of the institutional design and process constraints.

Since such systems fall outside of the traditional discourse of judicial reform, they have also been marginal to discourses of digital justice infrastructure.

Digitisation Without Visibility Into Decisions

Where justice systems have adopted digital tools, the dominant emphasis has been on case tracking rather than decision analysis. The uploading of orders is done in the form of documents, and not in structured data. Logic is confined within unquestionable text. Discretionary trends, delay and inconsistency are hard to record in a systematic manner.

This is contrary to other domains of DPI. In payment systems, all the transactions are designed, documented and can be analysed. In identity systems, there is standardisation and auditing of authentication events. Justice on the contrary is data poor but document rich.

The consequence is a governance blind spot. Policymakers can measure pendency and disposal rates, but they cannot easily examine why similar cases receive different outcomes, or where decision making bottlenecks consistently arise. Justice is transparent around but cloudy inside.

JusticeTech as an Analytical Category

JusticeTech, in this situation, should be taken into consideration as an analytic category, as opposed to a list of tools. It describes the mediation of the technology of producing justice, rather than how it is accessed.

Comparative research on legal systems increasingly treats justice outcomes as the product of workflows, information structures, and institutional incentives. In this light, delays and inconsistencies are the characteristics of system design and not a failure of an individual.

Seen this way, JusticeTech aligns conceptually with DPI. Both draw attention to infrastructure rather than interfaces. Both focus on how institutional capacity is embedded into systems rather than relying solely on human effort.

The Limits of a Transaction Centric DPI Model

The DPI in India has enhanced state capability in areas where standardisation was possible. However, justice exposes the limits of a digital governance model that prioritises transactions over reasoning.Procedural fairness is not necessarily associated with efficient service delivery.

This tension is increasingly visible in regulatory disputes, land conflicts, and welfare grievances. Citizens experience seamless digital access to services, yet face prolonged and opaque adjudication when disputes arise. Research on trust in digital states suggests that legitimacy depends not only on efficiency, but on fairness and explainability in public decision making.

Justice systems are therefore central to the long term credibility of digital governance.

Conclusion

JusticeTech points to a simple but consequential insight. Justice is a foundational state function that has not yet been infrastructurally digitised in the way identity, payments, or documents have been. Its exclusion from DPI is not merely technical. It reflects a deeper hesitation to treat decision making itself as infrastructure.

India’s DPI story is often narrated as a story of scale. Its next phase may depend on whether digital governance can engage seriously with the most complex function of the state, reasoning about rights, obligations, and disputes.

Until justice is understood and analysed as infrastructure rather than exception, India’s digital state will remain powerful, but only partially intelligible to the citizens it governs.