TL;DR: Almost every e-filing 3.0 rejection in India traces back to one of about fifteen recurring defects: a non-searchable PDF, a wrong page size, a vakalatnama that is not signed the way the registry expects, a DSC that is not registered against your e-filing profile, or a court-fee head that does not match the case type. This guide gives you the error-to-cause-to-fix table, the exact cure window at each court tier, and what happens to your filing date when you miss it, which matters far more than most advocates realise until a limitation objection lands on their desk.
On this page
- What e-filing 3.0 actually is
- Objection versus rejection: the distinction that controls your filing date
- The error to cause to fix table
- PDF and scanning defects in detail
- Vakalatnama and signature defects
- DSC, e-Sign, and the profile mismatch problem
- Case type, establishment, and act and section master errors
- Cause title, index, and page numbering defects
- Court fee, e-Stamp, and e-Pay mismatches
- Affidavit, notarisation, and annexure certification defects
- Limitation and delay condonation when the cure window is missed
- How to check objection status and cure a defect
- Supreme Court, High Courts, and district courts: what actually differs
- Pre-filing checklist
- Frequently asked questions
What e-filing 3.0 actually is
e-Filing 3.0 is the current version of the national electronic filing platform built by the e-Committee of the Supreme Court of India, run at filing.ecourts.gov.in, and adopted, with local Practice Directions layered on top, by most High Courts and district courts (ecourts.gov.in, reviewed 19 August 2026). It is not one uniform rulebook. The e-Committee’s manual describes registration, case type and establishment selection, document upload, indexing, e-signing or DSC authentication, and court-fee payment as a common workflow (eFiling Services 3.0 User Manual, ecourts.gov.in), but what each court accepts as properly filed, and what it kicks back as defective, is set separately by that court’s own Practice Directions.
The Delhi District Courts run their own e-filing intake through delhicourts.nic.in/efiling, which requires an advocate to register with name, mobile number, email, Bar Registration ID, and a photo ID proof, all mandatory, with two to three working days for a valid registration request to go live (delhicourts.nic.in/efiling, reviewed 19 August 2026). The Delhi High Court publishes a separate, searchable list of common objections covering everything from caveat reports to margin width. The Supreme Court runs its own portal at efiling3.sci.gov.in, open only to Advocates-on-Record, with its own scrutiny dashboard and defect-cure clock. File across more than one tier and you are dealing with a shared upload mechanism wrapped in three or more different rulebooks, not one system’s rules.
This matters because most of what gets called an “e-filing rejection” is not the software failing. It is a human registry official applying that court’s Practice Direction to your document and finding it does not comply, then flagging it as an objection. Advocates who deal with registry scrutiny daily describe the experience in blunt terms. One advocate practising regularly before the NCLT put it this way: “Filing is too technical at times with objections being raised for the most frivolous of issues. I personally have difficulty in getting urgent matters listed without the intervention of the Bench. Sometimes even after the bench permits, there is a delay in the part of the registry for the scrutiny” (Daksh India, reviewed 19 August 2026). The same complaint, technically correct objections that feel disproportionate to the defect, recurs across civil, criminal, and tribunal e-filing in India. Understanding the objection-versus-rejection distinction, covered next, is the single most useful thing you can take from this guide.
Objection versus rejection: the distinction that controls your filing date
The words “rejected” and “objection” get used loosely by advocates, but the portals and the rules distinguish them, and the distinction decides whether your filing date survives.
An objection, also called a defect, is the registry telling you that your filing has a curable problem: a missing certified copy, a wrong margin, an unsigned affidavit. The case still exists in the system as a pending, defective filing. You get a window to fix it and resubmit through the same filing, not a fresh one. On the Supreme Court’s portal, this shows up on your dashboard as “Defective Stage,” reachable through Scrutiny Status, and cured through the “Additional documents” option (efiling3.sci.gov.in/resources/FAQ, reviewed 19 August 2026). Every defect you cure has to go back with a Refiling Memo that answers each objection point by point.
A straightforward rejection, by contrast, usually means the filing never reached scrutiny in a curable state at all: a case type that does not exist at that establishment, a payment that failed, a document that would not open. There is nothing to “cure” because nothing valid was accepted. You start over with a fresh filing, and a fresh filing gets a fresh date.
The reason this distinction is not academic is Order IV of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, under which a suit is instituted by presentation of the plaint, and that presentation date stops the limitation clock. When a defect is raised and cured within the time the court allows, the corrected filing relates back to the original date of presentation. Miss that window, and several court rules treat the re-filing as a fresh institution with a fresh date, unless you separately apply for condonation of delay in re-filing. The Delhi High Court (Original Side) Rules, 2018 state this explicitly: a defective pleading must be re-filed within seven days at a time and thirty days in aggregate, and re-filing beyond that is a fresh institution unless accompanied by an application to condone the delay. This is exactly the trap that catches advocates who treat a defect notice as a low-priority task rather than a second deadline. On a matter close to limitation, a defect you sit on for six weeks can cost your client the suit itself, regardless of the merits.
The same principle appears in the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 space, where the Supreme Court has held that curing a defective appeal is permissible only within twenty-eight days of notification, and a re-filing after that window does not relate back for limitation purposes. That is a distinct statutory scheme with its own numbers, not interchangeable with a civil suit or writ petition, but the underlying logic, that a cure has a clock and missing it has consequences, holds across every Indian court running e-filing.
The error to cause to fix table
This is the reference table. Each row describes the defect roughly the way a registry actually states it, or the closest plain description where courts vary in wording, the underlying cause, and the fix.
| Error or objection as commonly stated | Underlying cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Document is not text searchable | PDF scanned as a flat image, not run through OCR | Rescan or reprocess at 300 DPI in OCR-searchable mode before upload |
| Page size or margin does not comply | Scanned at the wrong paper size, or margin narrower than the court’s Practice Direction (commonly 4 cm on one side) | Rescan on the correct paper size and margin, or reformat before printing and scanning |
| Font or spacing not as prescribed | Petition or pleading not typed to the court’s prescribed spacing and font size (many High Courts require double spacing, 14-point font) | Retype the document to the prescribed format before conversion to PDF |
| Vakalatnama not signed, or not properly executed | Missing advocate or party signature, wrong advocate named, or acceptance not recorded | Get the vakalatnama re-signed by client and advocate, re-scan, re-upload |
| Affidavit not attested properly, deponent’s age missing | Notarisation or oath incomplete, or attestation details missing from the affidavit | Have the deponent re-swear and re-attest the affidavit correctly, including age |
| Affidavit of clerk not allowed | Affidavit sworn by the advocate’s clerk instead of the party or an authorised signatory | Have the correct person, the party or an authorised representative, swear the affidavit |
| DSC not registered against e-filing profile | Digital Signature Certificate used to sign does not match the DSC linked in the advocate’s e-filing account | Register or update the correct DSC in the profile before signing, or re-issue signing with the registered DSC |
| eSign or DSC authentication failed | Aadhaar OTP mismatch, expired OTP, or USB token error during signing | Retry with the correct registered mobile number, or switch to DSC if eSign repeatedly fails |
| Wrong court establishment selected | Case filed against the wrong district, taluka, or court complex code in the establishment dropdown | Withdraw or correct the establishment selection and refile against the correct establishment |
| Wrong case type or act selected | Case type or the underlying act and section master picked does not match the relief actually sought | Refile or amend selecting the correct case type and the correct act and section from the master list |
| Cause title defective | Party names, array, or description in the cause title does not match the vakalatnama or supporting documents | Correct the cause title to match the vakalatnama and annexures exactly |
| Index or page numbering missing | No index filed, or annexure pages not numbered consecutively | Prepare a proper index with page references and renumber annexures before re-upload |
| Court fee mismatch | Court fee paid under the wrong head, wrong valuation, or wrong e-Stamp or e-Pay reference cited | Pay the correct court fee under the correct head and cite the correct challan or GRN reference |
| Annexure not marked or not certified | Documents attached without exhibit marks, or copies not certified as true copies | Mark each annexure and add the “true copy” certification with signature on each page as required |
| Limitation barred, no delay condonation application | Filing made beyond the limitation period without an accompanying application under Section 5 of the Limitation Act, 1963 | File a separate condonation of delay application with the filing, explaining the delay |
| File exceeds size limit | Combined PDF exceeds the portal’s cap, commonly 50 MB per document on several portals | Split into smaller indexed volumes or recompress the scan without dropping the required 300 DPI OCR quality |
Every one of these is curable. None of them requires starting the matter over from scratch if you catch and fix it inside the window your court allows.
PDF and scanning defects in detail
This category causes more rejections than any other, and it is entirely within your control before you ever hit upload.
Non-searchable PDFs get bounced on sight. If a registry clerk cannot highlight and copy text out of your PDF, the document was almost certainly scanned as a flat image rather than processed through OCR. Several High Court e-filing circulars, including one issued by the Delhi High Court IT Cell in 2024, specifically flag scanning that skips 300 DPI and OCR-searchable mode as non-compliant. Scan at 300 DPI and confirm the output is OCR-searchable before you upload, not after a defect notice tells you it was not.
Page size and margin defects are a printing problem disguised as a filing problem. The Delhi High Court’s list of common objections includes papers not filed on one side only, and a margin of 4 cm not left on the left-hand side of annexures. These are paper-filing-era rules the e-filing system still enforces, since scrutiny checks the scanned image against the same Practice Direction that governed physical filing. If the source document was printed to the wrong size or margin before scanning, no PDF post-processing fixes that; you have to reprint and rescan.
Font and spacing rules still apply. A petition typed in single spacing at 10-point font, then scanned, may fail scrutiny against a Practice Direction requiring double spacing and 14-point font, another item on the Delhi High Court’s list. Fix this once in your drafting template and it stops recurring.
File size caps vary by portal. The Supreme Court’s e-filing FAQ states only PDF format is accepted, with a 50 MB maximum (efiling3.sci.gov.in/resources/FAQ, reviewed 19 August 2026). District and High Court portals set similar caps. A voluminous annexure set, common in MACT compensation matters or property disputes with decades of documents, needs splitting into properly indexed volumes rather than one oversized file the portal refuses.
Vakalatnama and signature defects
A vakalatnama that is not properly executed is one of the most common single reasons a filing gets flagged. It has to be signed by the client, accepted and signed by the advocate, and filed in the format the establishment’s system expects for scanning and upload. A vakalatnama scanned at the wrong DPI hits the same OCR problem covered above; one missing the advocate’s acceptance signature is treated as not properly executed regardless of scan quality.
Two situations recur often. Where multiple advocates are on record and one signs the vakalatnama but a different advocate’s login e-files it, some establishments flag a mismatch between the filer and the executed document even though both are validly engaged; keep the filing advocate’s name consistent with the login used. Where a party-in-person files without an advocate, the vakalatnama requirement drops away, but the party’s own signature and identity verification on the petition then has to be complete, since there is no advocate’s acceptance to fall back on. Law students learning to draft and file cleanly on the first attempt run into exactly this list of objections during an internship, and getting comfortable curing them is a genuinely useful, low-glamour skill covered in what a law student can actually offer a chamber without connections.
DSC, e-Sign, and the profile mismatch problem
Every e-filing 3.0 system offers two authentication routes for signing a pleading: a Digital Signature Certificate, held on a USB token, or eSign through Aadhaar-based OTP authentication. Orissa High Court’s e-filing 3.0 FAQ describes the mechanics plainly: if you are digitally signing with a DSC, you sign the document first and then upload it; if you are using eSign, you authenticate after uploading, and eSign specifically requires Aadhaar authentication through the CDAC eSign service, with an OTP sent to your registered mobile number (orissahighcourt.nic.in/e-filing/faq.php, reviewed 19 August 2026).
DSC not registered against the e-filing profile is a defect that catches advocates who renew or replace their DSC token and forget to update it in their e-filing account. The signature on the document is technically valid, issued by a licensed certifying authority, but it does not match what the portal has on file for that advocate, and scrutiny flags the mismatch. The fix is to update the registered DSC in your profile before you sign anything with the new token, not after a filing bounces.
eSign OTP failures are usually simpler and more mundane than a DSC mismatch: an expired OTP window, a mobile number linked to Aadhaar that has since changed without the change being reflected in your UIDAI records, or a temporary outage on the CDAC eSign gateway the portal routes through. If eSign repeatedly fails on a filing with a hard deadline, switching to DSC authentication, where you hold a valid token, is the more reliable path rather than retrying eSign against the clock.
Neither method is universally mandatory. Some establishments still accept a hand-signed document, scanned and uploaded, where the advocate or party does not hold a DSC and eSign is not practical, though this varies by court and should be confirmed against the specific establishment’s current Practice Direction rather than assumed from another court’s rule.
Case type, establishment, and act and section master errors
The e-filing 3.0 workflow requires you to select the correct establishment, the correct case type, and, for criminal filings in particular, the correct act and section from a master list built into the system. Getting any of these wrong routes the case to the wrong queue or triggers an outright rejection rather than a curable objection, because the case never enters the correct scrutiny pipeline in the first place.
Wrong establishment happens most often when a district has more than one court complex or when a matter needs to move between a civil and a commercial court within the same district. Selecting the wrong establishment from the dropdown means your filing lands with a registry that has no jurisdiction over it, and the fix is a fresh filing against the correct establishment rather than a defect cure.
Family petitions are one of the highest-volume categories to trip this up, since a visitation, custody, or maintenance application has to be routed through the right forum and act master from the start; where child visitation and maintenance applications actually get filed walks through picking the correct forum before you ever open the e-filing portal. The same establishment-selection problem gets harder still where one party is abroad, since an NRI divorce and custody matter can involve a genuine question of which Indian court has jurisdiction at all, not just which establishment code to pick.
Wrong case type or act and section selection surfaces most in criminal filings under the new codes. India’s criminal procedure now runs primarily under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS), the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (BNSS), and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA), replacing the IPC, CrPC, and Evidence Act respectively for offences after 1 July 2024, with the old codes still governing offences registered before that date. Selecting a BNS section master entry against a matter that should be indexed under the corresponding IPC provision, because the offence predates the transition, or the reverse, is a defect the system’s own act master flags on scrutiny. BNS to IPC mapping and BNSS to CrPC mapping are the reference points to check before selecting the master entry, not after.
Cause title, index, and page numbering defects
A cause title that does not match the vakalatnama, the annexures, or the underlying documents is flagged for the same reason a mismatched signature is flagged: scrutiny checks internal consistency across the filing, not just each document in isolation. A party’s name spelled differently in the cause title than in the vakalatnama, a respondent omitted from the array who appears in an annexed order, or a description of a party, such as a company’s registered address, that does not match its own incorporation documents, are all defects raised on this ground.
Index and page numbering sound like formatting trivia and function as a substantive filing requirement in most Practice Directions. An index that lists each annexure with the page on which it begins, and consecutive page numbering across the entire filed set including annexures, is what lets a judge or a registry clerk find the document referred to in your petition without opening every annexure in sequence. A filing without an index, or with annexures that are individually numbered rather than continuously numbered across the set, gets returned for exactly this reason often enough that several courts list it as a standing objection category rather than a one-off comment.
Court fee, e-Stamp, and e-Pay mismatches
Court fee defects fall into three patterns: paying under the wrong head, such as injunction-rate fee paid on a declaration suit because the valuation was miscalculated; a mismatch between the amount paid and the relief actually claimed, common where a plaint is amended to add a relief after the original fee was calculated; and citing the wrong e-Stamp or e-Pay reference, most often a challan or GRN generated for a different matter pasted into the wrong filing during a busy week.
The e-Committee’s eFiling 3.0 manual describes a Court Fee Wallet for advocates, where an advance balance can be drawn down per filing, with the caveat that a wallet balance credited against one establishment cannot pay fees for a different establishment (eFiling Services 3.0 User Manual, ecourts.gov.in). This trips up advocates who file across more than one district and assume a top-up carries across establishments like a bank balance would.
Affidavit, notarisation, and annexure certification defects
An affidavit has to meet three requirements scrutiny checks independently: the correct person has sworn it, it is attested or notarised as required, and the deponent’s details, commonly including age, are complete. The Delhi High Court’s list of common objections specifically flags an affidavit sworn by a counsel’s clerk rather than the party as impermissible, and flags improper attestation or a missing deponent age as a separate, recurring category (delhihighcourt.nic.in, list of common objections, reviewed 19 August 2026).
Annexures need two things easy to skip under deadline pressure: an exhibit mark identifying what the document is (Annexure A, Annexure P-1, in the numbering convention that court uses), and, where it is a copy rather than an original, a “true copy” certification at the bottom of each page, signed by the person certifying it. A stack of documents attached without either is functionally unreadable to scrutiny, however relevant to the case, and gets returned on that ground alone. Where the annexure is electronic evidence, a screenshot, an email chain, a chat export, that certification question runs deeper than a scanning formality, since it also has to satisfy the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam’s Section 63 certificate requirement; preserving evidence properly before you call a lawyer is worth doing at the time the evidence is created, not retrofitted the week before filing.
Limitation and delay condonation when the cure window is missed
The single highest-stakes defect on this whole list is not a formatting error at all. It is filing close to the limitation deadline, having a defect raised, and then treating the cure window the way you would treat a routine to-do item rather than a second deadline running in parallel with the first.
As covered above, the Delhi High Court (Original Side) Rules, 2018 give seven days per instance and thirty days in aggregate, and re-filing beyond that is deemed a fresh institution unless accompanied by an application to condone the delay. District courts and other High Courts set their own cure periods, so the exact number of days has to be confirmed against the rule governing the court you filed in. What is uniform is the structure: a cure completed inside the window relates back to the original filing date, and a cure completed outside it does not, absent a separate application under Section 5 of the Limitation Act, 1963 explaining the delay.
The practical rule is simple to state and easy to neglect under caseload pressure: on a matter close to the limitation period, a defect notice is not a low-priority task. Diary the cure deadline the moment the objection is raised, separately from the underlying limitation date, and treat it with the same urgency as any date that can end a case on a technicality rather than the merits.
How to check objection status and cure a defect
The mechanics differ slightly by portal, but the sequence is consistent across e-filing 3.0 implementations.
- Check the dashboard, not your email, for the authoritative status. The Supreme Court’s portal shows Scrutiny Status directly on the AOR dashboard, distinguishing Defective Stage from Pending for Scrutiny (efiling3.sci.gov.in/resources/FAQ, reviewed 19 August 2026). The e-Committee’s eFiling 3.0 system exposes an Objections tab under the case’s e-filing menu listing every objection raised by the court on the submitted case, its pleadings, or any interlocutory applications (eFiling Services 3.0 User Manual, ecourts.gov.in). An email notification, where sent, is a courtesy copy, not the record of truth.
- Read the objection text exactly as stated, not as you assume it means. Registry wording is often terse and references a specific rule number or Practice Direction clause rather than describing the defect in plain language, and correcting the wrong thing wastes another cure cycle.
- Fix the underlying document, whether that means re-scanning, re-signing, re-typing, or re-executing an affidavit or vakalatnama, rather than only annotating or explaining the defect in a cover note.
- Prepare a Refiling Memo where the court requires one, addressing each objection point by point against the corrected filing. The Supreme Court’s process specifically requires a digitised Refiling Memo accompanying every cured defect (efiling3.sci.gov.in/resources/FAQ, reviewed 19 August 2026), and several High Courts and district establishments expect an equivalent covering letter or memo even where it is not called by that exact name.
- Re-upload through the same filing, using the Additional Documents or Defect Cure function, not by starting a new case, since a fresh case creates a fresh filing date and defeats the entire point of a curable objection.
- Confirm the corrected status before you rely on the matter being live, since a re-upload that itself has a defect, an incomplete Refiling Memo, or a document uploaded to the wrong slot, can generate a second round of scrutiny rather than clearing the first one.
Supreme Court, High Courts, and district courts: what actually differs
All three tiers now run on some version of the e-Committee’s e-filing platform, but the access rules, the authentication expectations, and the defect-cure procedures diverge meaningfully.
| Feature | Supreme Court | High Courts | District courts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who can file | Advocate-on-Record only, for the party | Any enrolled advocate, or party-in-person where permitted | Any enrolled advocate, or party-in-person where permitted |
| Portal | efiling3.sci.gov.in, SC-specific | filing.ecourts.gov.in with that High Court’s Practice Directions | filing.ecourts.gov.in with district establishment’s Practice Directions, often layered under the High Court’s rules |
| Defect cure window | 28 days for AOR to cure via Additional Documents | Set by each High Court’s own rules, commonly 7 to 30 days depending on the rule | Set by each district establishment, generally following the jurisdictional High Court’s Practice Direction |
| Refiling documentation | Digitised Refiling Memo mandatory | Varies; several require an equivalent covering memo | Varies by establishment |
| Common local flavour | Petition-type specific master (SLP(C), SLP(Crl), Writ, Civil Appeal) | Local objection lists published on court websites, e.g. Delhi High Court’s list of common objections | Cause list volume and establishment selection dominate; local vernacular filing common |
The most consequential difference is who is allowed to file. Every Supreme Court filing goes through an Advocate-on-Record, so a defect in an SLP is the AOR’s problem regardless of which counsel argued below. At the High Court and district level, any enrolled advocate can generally file, and increasingly a party-in-person can too, which is also why the volume and variety of common objections is higher there: a much broader range of filers, with a much broader range of familiarity with the Practice Direction in force, feeds the same scrutiny pipeline. How High Courts exercise Article 226 jurisdiction and special leave petitions under Article 136 cover what proceeds once a filing clears scrutiny at each tier, a separate question from the defect-cure mechanics here.
A related but distinct system worth flagging is the consumer forum e-filing system, e-Daakhil, which runs independently of the e-Committee’s platform and has its own defect and objection process, not covered here.
Pre-filing checklist
Run this before you upload, not after a defect notice tells you what you missed.
- PDF is confirmed text-searchable, scanned at 300 DPI, not a flat image
- Page size, margin, font, and spacing match the specific court’s Practice Direction, not a generic template
- Vakalatnama is signed by client and advocate, and the filing advocate’s login matches the name on the vakalatnama
- Affidavit is sworn by the correct person, properly attested, with the deponent’s age stated
- DSC registered in your e-filing profile is the current, valid token, or eSign mobile number is current with UIDAI
- Correct establishment, case type, and act and section master entries selected, checked against the applicable code (BNS/BNSS/BSA or IPC/CrPC/Evidence Act depending on offence date)
- Cause title matches the vakalatnama and every annexure exactly, party by party
- Index prepared, with continuous page numbering across the full filed set including annexures
- Every annexure exhibit-marked, and every copy certified as a true copy on each page
- Court fee calculated against the correct head and valuation, with the correct e-Stamp or e-Pay reference cited
- Limitation position checked; delay condonation application prepared and attached if the filing is beyond the limitation period
- Combined file size confirmed under the portal’s cap, split into indexed volumes if not
- Cure-window deadline diaried the moment any objection is raised, tracked separately from the underlying limitation date
A workflow tool built for district and taluka practice treats the cause-list check and the objection-status check as the same kind of daily habit: a fixed, short routine run before you file, not a reactive scramble after a defect notice arrives. The same discipline that keeps you from missing a listed matter is what keeps you from letting a curable defect quietly become an uncurable one.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between an e-filing objection and a rejection?
An objection is a curable defect on a filing that already exists in the system. You get a window to fix and resubmit it, and a properly cured filing relates back to the original filing date. A rejection generally means the filing never entered a valid, curable state at all, most often because the payment failed or the case was filed against the wrong establishment, and you have to file fresh.
How many days do I get to cure a defect in e-filing?
It depends on the court. The Supreme Court gives an Advocate-on-Record 28 days via the Additional Documents option. The Delhi High Court (Original Side) Rules, 2018 give seven days per instance and thirty days in aggregate. District courts and other High Courts set their own periods, so confirm the exact window against the rule governing the specific court you filed in.
Does my filing date change if I cure a defect after the deadline?
If the cure is completed within the time the court allows, the corrected filing relates back to the original date of presentation. Miss the window, and several court rules treat the re-filing as a fresh institution with a fresh date, unless you apply for condonation of delay in re-filing and the court grants it. This is why a defect notice on a matter close to limitation needs the same urgency as the limitation deadline itself.
Why does e-filing 3.0 reject my PDF as not searchable?
Because it was scanned as a flat image rather than processed through OCR, and scrutiny checks whether text in the document can be selected and copied. Scan at 300 DPI in OCR-searchable mode before you upload, not after a defect notice tells you the document failed.
My DSC is valid but the filing says it is not registered. Why?
Your token is genuine, issued by a licensed certifying authority, but it does not match the DSC linked to your e-filing profile, usually because you renewed or replaced the token without updating the profile. Update the registered DSC before signing with the new token.
Should I use eSign or DSC to authenticate my filing?
Either is generally accepted where the court permits both. eSign uses Aadhaar-based OTP and is faster if your registered mobile number is current, but is vulnerable to OTP delivery failures. DSC uses a physical USB token and, once registered correctly, is more reliable under deadline pressure since it does not depend on live OTP delivery.
What happens if I select the wrong case type or act and section during filing?
This typically causes rejection outright rather than a curable objection, since the case never enters the correct scrutiny queue. Correct the selection and refile. For criminal matters, check whether the offence date falls before or after 1 July 2024 to confirm whether the BNS, BNSS, and BSA master entries or the corresponding IPC, CrPC, and Evidence Act entries apply.
Is a hand-signed, scanned vakalatnama acceptable, or does it need a digital signature?
This varies by establishment. Some courts accept a hand-signed vakalatnama, scanned and uploaded, without a DSC or eSign, particularly where the advocate does not hold a DSC. Check the specific court’s current Practice Direction rather than assuming a different court’s rule applies.
How do I check the objection status on my filing without waiting for an email?
Check the portal dashboard directly. The Supreme Court’s system shows Scrutiny Status distinguishing Defective Stage from Pending for Scrutiny. The eFiling 3.0 system used by High Courts and district courts has an Objections tab listing every objection raised on the case, its pleadings, or any interlocutory application. Treat the dashboard, not an email notification, as the authoritative record.
What is a Refiling Memo and do I always need one?
It is a document, digitised where required, that answers each objection point by point against your corrected, re-uploaded filing. The Supreme Court’s process makes this mandatory for every cured defect. Several High Courts and district establishments expect an equivalent covering memo even where it is not called a Refiling Memo by name.
Why was my filing rejected even though I filed at the correct court complex?
Establishment selection within a district can still be wrong even when the district is correct, particularly where a district has multiple court complexes or a matter needs a specific commercial or specialised court rather than the general civil establishment. Confirm the exact establishment code, not just the district.
Where do I find the exact scanning and formatting rules for my specific court?
Each High Court publishes its own e-filing Practice Directions, and several, including Delhi, publish a standalone list of common objections on their website. Check that court’s website directly, since page size, margin, and font requirements are set locally and vary between High Courts even though the underlying e-filing platform is shared.
Does a research tool help with any part of this, or is this purely a procedural problem?
Most of what causes a rejection is procedural, and no research tool fixes a wrong page margin or an unsigned affidavit. Where a filing involves a fresh substantive question, such as confirming a cited authority is still good law before a petition clears scrutiny, a research tool that shows the cited paragraph rather than a bare headnote saves that separate verification step, but it has no bearing on the formatting and authentication defects that account for most e-filing objections.