Before we share the next comic in the series, a big thank you to all of you for joining the ‘Care Protocols from the Future’, the first public panel in the series. Those of you who wanted to join in but couldn’t, we have a recording of the conversation for you that you can watch right here:
As Generative AI rapidly gains ground in India, Human in the Loop explores how communities may confront its unintended consequences and near-future risks.
These stories are imagined speculative futures, grounded in real data and policy directions, designed to help us reflect on what AI could mean for our lives, and how we think about and engage with technological evolution to move towards desirable futures for all.
The stories in Human in the Loop are provocations — invitations to imagine futures that prioritise dignity, fairness, and justice over unchecked speed and efficiency.
In Premium Justice, set in a near-future Tamil Nadu, the judicial system turns to AI to reduce staggering backlogs and speed up decisions. Judge Nathan, a techno-optimist, embraces the promise of efficiency — until he realises how profoundly the system has shifted.
Courtroom glitches, automated verdicts, and tiered access to “Basic” vs. “Premium” AI legal tools quietly reshape the delivery and meaning of justice. Those who can pay for better services tilt outcomes in their favour. Judges themselves begin deferring to machine-generated summaries and case files. And behind the scenes, new “code scrubbers” — unseen, unaccountable actors — quietly steer what reaches the court record.
At its core, Premium Justice is a provocation: what happens when human judgment is coded out of the justice system, and fairness itself becomes a commodity?
Because India’s judiciary is already overburdened. While the Indian judiciary is the beacon of justice for millions, it is simultaneously hard to move through the process due to slower case processing, often making the ‘process feel like punishment’.
At the end of 2024, over 50 million cases were pending in Indian courts — a 20% increase since 2020.
76% of pending cases involve undertrials still waiting for investigations or trials to conclude.
To ease the burden, AI tools like SUPACE and SUVAS are already being used, with promises of faster case disposal and easier access by helping provide decision-making information and translate judgments into various regional languages, respectively.
There is little information in the public domain about how well these tools actually work, partially owing to how nascent they are. Further, efficiency is not the same as justice. AI-driven summaries, translations, and recommendations may seem like assistive tools — but in practice, they can distort outcomes, entrench inequities, and shift decision-making power away from accountable judges into unaccountable systems. Globally, we are already seeing signs: from ‘shadow use’ of AI chatbots by courts to fabricated precedents making their way into trials.
- drawn from the essay accompanying the comic, Premium Justice
We have recently partnered with DAKSH for our latest project, ‘Ethical AI Adoption in the Indian Judiciary: Strengthening Access to Justice’. This project is supported by UNDP, and through it, we seek to develop clear usage guidelines and ethical and robust procurement processes as a way to ensure that the integration of AI in courts adheres to natural justice principles and advances public interest. Sr Research Associate Dona Mathew and the DAKSH team have begun conducting field research: visiting courts and conducting stakeholder interviews for grounded insights on best practices. Keep an eye out for more from this project here.
The op-ed ‘Set the guardrails for AI use in courtrooms’, authored by Dona with Leah Verghese and Smita Mutt from DAKSH, for The Hindu looks at the current landscape of AI use in India’s courts, and advocates for clear frameworks as a crucial need to guide its safe and responsible use in India’s judicial systems. Read it here.
Thank you for reading Premium Justice! This is the fourth of seven stories in the Human in the Loop series. Human in the Loop has been developed by Digital Futures Lab in partnership with Quicksand and supported by Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies.
🔁 More coming soon — stay with us as we map futures from the ground up.
📩 We’d love your thoughts on the comic! — reply to this email, write to Sasha at sasha@digitalfutureslab.in
🤝🏽 See a potential in this comic to collaborate with us? Reach out to Shivranjana at shivranjana@digitalfutureslab.in
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