"There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts." Mahatma Gandhi
On 30 April 2025, the Supreme Court of India did something quietly revolutionary. In the writ petitions of Pragya Prasun and Amar Jain v. Union of India (Pragya Prasun v. Union of India, [2025] INSC 599 [India] [decided Apr. 30, 2025] [Pardiwala & Mahadevan, JJ.] ) held that the right to digital access is an intrinsic part of the right to life and liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution. The petitioners: acid-attack survivors with facial and eye injuries, and an advocate living with complete blindness, had been locked out of opening bank accounts and buying SIM cards because digital KYC required them to blink at a camera or read text off a screen. The Court recognised what they had long known: when essential services move online, accessibility is not a courtesy. It is a constitutional guarantee.
The reasoning is worth dwelling on. In an era where governance, banking, education and healthcare are increasingly mediated through digital platforms, the Court observed, Article 21 must be reinterpreted to meet these technological realities. Bridging the digital divide, it held, is no longer a matter of policy discretion but a constitutional imperative one the State must meet by designing inclusive systems that serve not only the privileged, but also the marginalised and the historically excluded.
At CORD, this principle is the ground we stand on.
We are a Digital First Dispute Resolution (ODR) institution built for exactly this digital age. If access to services must be universal, then access to justice, the service that protects all the others, cannot be the exception. Traditional litigation, for all its constitutional importance, asks a great deal of those who seek it: travel to a distant courthouse, navigate unfamiliar procedure, absorb mounting costs, and often wait years for a hearing. ODR removes those barriers. Through CORD, arbitration, mediation, and facilitated negotiation happen online from the comfort of one's home, on one's own device, in one's own language. We support proceedings in 25 languages, with an average resolution time of roughly 75 days in Arbitration, 45 days in Mediation and 21 days in Conciliation (it may vary depending on different sectors).
The scale of the Courtroom wait is well-documented. DAKSH’s study of court data found that cases in Delhi’s subordinate courts had been pending for an average of 4 years, with only half disposed of within 2 and in the subordinate courts of a state like Gujrat, average pendency reached roughly 9.5 years. Even routine steps crawl: A report on Bengaluru Courts indicates that serving summons in Bengaluru Rural took 273 days on average, and in 2024 trial and judgement in the city’s dedicated commercial courts ran anywhere from 2-28 months. A favourable verdict is not the finish line, either enforcing a decree through execution proceedings has itself averaged about 4 years. And even the final act of writing a reserved judgement can stretch on: a 2026 Supreme Court Observer analysis put the median at 27 days, but found individual cases waiting as long as 226.
For a person with a disability, for someone in a remote village, for an elderly pensioner or a first-time claimant, those demands can amount to a quiet denial of justice.
This is why the matters CORD handles are so wide-ranging. Disputes with banks and NBFCs over loans and recoveries, securities-market grievances under SEBI’s SmartODR framework and claims across insurance, tenancy, the workplace, and e-commerce, all of these can be resolved remotely, securely, and with the same enforceability as any other arbitral award. There is no queue, no intimidating gallery, no premium on physical presence. Resolution is, quite literally, a click away.
This is what makes ODR more than a convenience. It is a structural answer to the very exclusion the Supreme Court has now condemned. As our lives migrate online, the question is no longer whether justice will follow, it is whether it will follow everyone. At CORD, we believe it must, and we are building the infrastructure to ensure it does: faster, fairer, and within reach of every person, regardless of who they are or where they stand.
Sources
- Pragya Prasun v. Union of India, (2025) INSC 599 (India) (decided Apr. 30, 2025) (Pardiwala & Mahadevan, JJ.), https://cdnbbsr.s3waas.gov.in/s36ee69d3769e832ec77c9584e0b7ba112/uploads/2024/11/20250501496797524.pdf.
- Arunav Kaul, Ahmed Pathan & Harish Narasappa, Deconstructing Delay: Analyses of Data from High Courts and Subordinate Courts, in Justice in India (DAKSH), https://www.dakshindia.org/Daksh_Justice_in_India/court-case-pendency-india.
- Atishya Kumar & Gokul Krishnan, Karnataka's New Case Clock: Can Time-Bound Justice Deliver?, Bar & Bench (Aug. 13, 2025), https://www.barandbench.com/columns/karnatakas-new-case-clock-can-timebound-justice-deliver.
- N.V. Geetha, How Long Does the Supreme Court Take to Deliver a Judgement?, Sup. Ct. Observer (Apr. 30, 2026), https://www.scobserver.in/journal/how-long-does-the-supreme-court-take-to-deliver-a-judgement/.