India lives in a multiverse of time, technology, and capabilities. The judiciary is no exception.

And so, in two Indian courtrooms, on two ordinary days this year, justice moved at two entirely different timelines.

In a district court in Bihar, a judge leaned over a witness statement so illegible it might as well have been ancient calligraphy. The testimony, handwritten years earlier by a colleague who had since transferred, was now a puzzle no one could solve. The current judge took a photo, sent it over Whatsapp, and waited. The reply came back. They couldn’t remember their own handwriting.

A crucial line of cross-examination, and possibly the case’s outcome itself, dissolved into interpretive uncertainty. And this is not an anomaly; it happens across states.

A thousand kilometres south, in another courtroom in Kerala, there was no handwriting at all. A witness spoke; an AI-powered tool listened. A clean, searchable transcript appeared in real time—punctuated, structured, permanent. Stenographers were not clambering to catch up, litigants were not begging for readable copies.

This split-screen view—one courtroom running on memory, the other on machine comprehension—is not a metaphor. It is India’s judiciary in 2025: a system where 19th-century workflows and modern AI systems operate side by side, neither quite replacing the other.

Earlier in 2025, the Kerala High Court issuedLivelawKerala High Court Makes AI-Based Transcription Tool Mandatory For Recording Of Witness Statements From November 01 an office memorandum, making AI-assisted live transcription mandatory across all district courts. Also, earlier in November, the Supreme Court’s Centre for Research and Planning released a White PaperSupreme Court of IndiaWhite Paper on Artificial Intelligence and Judiciary on Artificial Intelligence and the Judiciary—India’s first serious attempt to articulate how algorithms should be used and governed inside courts.

The momentum is new, but the diagnosis is not. As Utkarsh Saxena, co-founder of the non-profit Adalat AI, put it: “Lawyers are essentially language models. Reading comprehension is the essence of our work.” And if that’s true, then the judiciary’s delays—its illegible notes, missing stenos, fragmented workflows—are not moral failures but linguistic ones.