Supreme Court’s Diamond Jubilee

• The Prime Minister inaugurated the Diamond Jubilee celebration of the Supreme Court of India on 28 January at the Supreme Court auditorium.
• He also launched citizen-centric information and technology initiatives that include-
  • The Digital Supreme Court Reports (SCR) will make Supreme Court judgments available to the citizens of the country free of cost and in electronic format. The key features of digital SCR are that all 519 volumes of the Supreme Court reports since 1950, covering 36,308 cases, shall be available in a digital format, bookmarked, user-friendly, and with open access.
  • Digital Courts 2.0 application is a recent initiative under the e-Courts project to make court records available to the Judges of the district courts in electronic form. This is coupled with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for transcribing speech to text on a real-time basis.
  • The Prime Minister also launched the new website of the Supreme Court which will be in bilingual format in English and Hindi and has been redesigned with a user-friendly interface.

ABOUT SUPREME COURT

• The Supreme Court is the apex judicial body under the Constitution of India.
  • Article 124 of the Constitution states that “there shall be a Supreme Court of India”.
• It came into existence on January 26^th, 1950 with coming of Constitution in force.
  • The Supreme Court was inaugurated two days later, on January 28^th, 1950.
• The original Constitution of 1950 envisaged a Supreme Court with a Chief Justice and seven puisne judges, leaving it to the Parliament to increase this number.
  • The Parliament increased the number of judges from eight in 1950 to 11 in 1956, 14 in 1960, 18 in 1978, 26 in 1986, 31 in 2009 and 34 in 2019 (current strength).
• The Supreme Court comprises the Chief Justice and not more than 33 other judges appointed by the President of India.
• The Supreme Court has original, appellate, and advisory jurisdiction and it serves as the final court of appeals and the final interpreter of the Constitution.