The Supreme Court of India, where an advocate has sought preservation of video-conferencing records after losing access to his own hearing on September 21, 2026

An advocate appearing as Petitioner-in-Person before the Supreme Court has written to Chief Justice Surya Kant on the administrative side, asking that the Court preserve the electronic Video Conferencing records of a hearing during which he says he lost access to the courtroom feed for roughly 20 minutes while his own case was being dealt with.

Narendra Kumar Goswami, an Advocate of the Supreme Court and Petitioner-in-Person in W.P.(C) No.790/2026; a matter concerning alleged misappropriation of donations connected with the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Temple, states that his petition was Item No.42 on the cause list of Court No.1 for September 21, expressly connected with Item No.41 and two other matters, with the cause list recording that all four were to be taken up together.

What happened during the hearing 

According to the representation, Goswami joined the Court's official Webex facility and remained connected throughout, with his internet functioning and the Control Room reachable via chat. The Court No.1 feed had been visible on his screen earlier in the session, at around 1:43 PM. The difficulty, he says, arose later — during the period when the connected batch came up.

The representation reconstructs the sequence from what it describes as the Webex platform's own contemporaneous chat records:

3:14 PM- Control Room: "item 41" announced in the public chat.
3:15 PM- Control Room: "Item 41 PIP."
3:23 PM- Goswami: "Sir I am Appearing in item number 42 (PIP) connected with item 41. I am unable to see the court proceedings. Kindly help."
3:23 PM- Control Room: "there is pip in item 41."
3:28 PM- Goswami: "Will My item not be entertained Sir? I am also PIP appearing through VC in the same matter."
3:35 PM- Goswami: Sends a further message about his inability to participate through video; no further reply is recorded.
3:38 PM- The courtroom feed becomes visible again as the Control Room announces Item No.45.

The representation notes that the Control Room's 3:23 PM reply referred only to a PIP in Item 41, even though Goswami had specifically identified himself as the PIP in the connected Item No.42, a mismatch he flags as significant when multiple Petitioners-in-Person are appearing in a connected batch.

What he is - and isn't - asking for 

The representation is explicit that it seeks no judicial relief. It states at the outset: "I do not seek reconsideration, modification, interpretation or review of any judicial order. I make no allegation against any learned Judge, Court Master, officer of the Registry or technical personnel."

Its request is limited to three things: preservation of the electronic records of Court No.1 between approximately 3:10 PM and 3:40 PM on September 21, including Webex session data, participant join-and-leave logs, Control Room chat records, moderator event logs and server-side timestamps; an administrative or technical inquiry into whether the interruption stemmed from a judicial direction, a moderator action, a technical malfunction or some other cause; and consideration of a prospective institutional protocol distinguishing public livestream access from authenticated party access in virtual hearings.

-Preserve the Webex records of Court No.1 for the relevant half-hour window before routine deletion or overwriting;

-Ascertain, from the Court's own technical records, the cause of the interruption;

-Communicate the administrative or technical conclusion to him, if consistent with judicial confidentiality;

-Consider a prospective protocol under which an authenticated party's access continues even when public livestreaming is suspended, with real-time escalation to the Court Master if a party reports lost access.

The legal grounding 

The representation situates its request within the Supreme Court's own jurisprudence on court technology, citing Swapnil Tripathi v. Supreme Court of India, (2018) 10 SCC 639, for the principle that technology must enlarge meaningful access to judicial proceedings rather than merely simulate electronic presence, and Sarvesh Mathur v. Registrar General, High Court of Punjab & Haryana, 2023 INSC 891, on the inadequacy of virtual participation. It also refers to the Supreme Court's own circular of May 18, 2026 on appearance through video conferencing, and to the e-Committee's Model Rules for Video Conferencing; while acknowledging that the latter were framed for High Courts and are not independently binding on the Supreme Court.

"A litigant formally admitted into the virtual courtroom should not remain technologically present but judicially absent without anyone knowing that it has happened."

The representation draws a distinction between a member of the public watching a livestream and an authenticated party or counsel admitted to participate in their own case, arguing that the loss of access by the latter engages principles of procedural fairness rather than mere broadcast inconvenience. It states plainly that it does not assert the September 21 order is vitiated on this ground; that, it says, is a question for the judicial side, should it arise at all.

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