Global Public Sector

How India’s National Informatics Centre Is Modernizing the Indian Judiciary With AI

Objective

The National Informatics Centre (NIC) is playing a critical role in the Indian government’s digital transformation efforts, aiming to improve governance and promote the use of technology for socioeconomic development. NIC, part of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), is the technology partner of the Government of India. They’re responsible for designing and developing IT systems, providing the government IT infrastructure, and advising on emerging technologies. The Artificial Intelligence Resource Division (AIRD), a division of NIC, is working toward building cutting-edge AI solutions to modernize the Indian judiciary. Using NVIDIA® Riva, NIC has built a court-proceeding transcription and translation tool that supports Indic languages. They’ve also developed a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based judicial search and summarization solution using NVIDIA NIM™, TensorRT™-LLM and Triton™ Inference Server on the NVIDIA DGX™ platform.

Customer

National Informatics Centre, India

Use Case

Conversational AI
Generative AI / LLMs

Products

Triton Inference Server
NVIDIA Riva
NVIDIA DGX
NVIDIA AI Enterprise
NIM
TensorRT-LLM

The Need for AI in the Modern Judiciary

Each day, nearly 50,000 cases are listed in India’s high courts and over a million cases are listed in the country’s district courts . With such a high volume of cases, AI tools can help with managing case backlogs and analyzing legal texts to support judicial decision-making and alleviate the pressure on judicial workers. Under India’s Digital Court 2.0 initiative, NIC is building AI-driven solutions to improve efficiency, transparency, and accessibility in the administration of justice.

National Informatics Centre

Improving Transcription and Translation of Court Proceedings

With 22 officially recognized languages in India, providing judicial services in citizens’ native languages is an ongoing challenge. NIC developed a speech transcription and translation service that supports Indic languages to improve the operation and accessibility of Indian courts.

The streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) service can transcribe speech in English and seven Indic languages. The Indic language ASR models were trained using the NVIDIA NeMo™ framework. This was deployed on GPUs with Riva to enhance inference capabilities. The neural machine translation (NMT) service supports the translation of court proceedings in all 22 Indic languages. The ASR/NMT solution will assist over 18,000 daily district court sessions after full rollout.

Reference architecture of the ASR/NMT pipeline for courts. The streaming ASR models, which support eight languages, rely on NVIDIA Riva. The language translation module, which supports 22 Indic languages, is deployed with NVIDIA Triton Inference Server.

“NVIDIA's ecosystem provides a robust foundation for building high-performance AI applications. The comprehensive suite of software frameworks coupled with advanced accelerated computing hardware, reduces time to deployment.”

Sharmistha Dasgupta
Deputy Director General, AIRD, NIC

Results

Improved Accessibility and Inclusivity

  • Digitized and translated legal proceedings enhance inclusivity.

Enhanced Digitization Accuracy and Cost Savings

  • Using ASR to automate the transcription process, courts significantly reduce translation time, reduce errors, and increase efficiency.

Enhanced Legal Research and Faster Case Resolution

  • Expediting legal research using a RAG solution leads to faster justice disbursal.

Building a Court-Proceedings Search Assistant

NIC has developed a RAG-based judicial search assistant for Supreme Court justices. It will serve as a specialized search service to help judges quickly find specific information to support the delivery of justice.

To create this assistant, Supreme Court judgments have been converted into embeddings with the NVIDIA NeMo Embedding microservice and stored in a GPU-accelerated vector database. In response to verdict-specific queries, the RAG solution retrieves information from the vector database using the NVIDIA NeMo Retriever microservice. Results are refined with the NeMo Reranking microservice and fed into a TensorRT-LLM-optimized large language model deployed using LLM NIM, which utilizes the query, prompt, and retrieved context to generate a natural response containing the necessary information and associated verdict documents. The solution was deployed on DGX A100 Tensor Core GPUs and uses NVIDIA AI Enterprise software for efficient embedding generation, reranking, and inference.

The solution will be available to all of India’s Supreme Court judges with plans to scale the judicial assistant to the entire judicial system.

NIC has also developed abstractive and extractive document summarization to generate summaries of pleadings. It's crucial for those needing a quick, accurate summary, as manual summarization is time consuming.

Reference architecture of NIC’s judicial search assistant, built using NVIDIA AI Enterprise software.

Looking Forward

Through innovative technology solutions and digital initiatives, NIC is facilitating greater efficiency, transparency, and accessibility within the Indian judicial system. With AI, NIC is paving the way for a more responsive and inclusive judiciary that meets the evolving needs of a dynamic society. As NIC continues to collaborate with judicial bodies across the country, their efforts are instrumental in ushering in a new era of justice administration that’s both streamlined and citizen-centric.

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