How to Track Cases in the Allahabad High Court

Where the Allahabad High Court publishes case data

Step-by-step: tracking a case

1. 1

   Fix the seat first

   Under paragraph 14 of the U.P. High Courts (Amalgamation) Order, 1948, the Lucknow Bench sits for cases arising in such areas in Oudh as the Chief Justice directs, and a further proviso lets him send cases, or classes of cases, from those areas to Allahabad instead. Where only part of the cause of action arose in Oudh, Lucknow may be open to you. In practice: searching the wrong seat returns nothing, which reads exactly like "no such case".

2. 2

   Search by case number

   Case Type (a dropdown), Case No. and Case Year are all mandatory, plus a numeric captcha with an audio option if the image is unreadable. There is no free-text case-number box — if you cannot identify the type in the dropdown, you cannot run the search.

3. 3

   Search by party name

   Party Type (Petitioner or Respondent), Party Name and Year are required, with a captcha. That is a single year, not a date range, so if the year of institution is uncertain, run the search once per candidate year.

4. 4

   Search by CNR

   Use the CNR Number option on eCourts High Court Services. A CNR is the sixteen-character national identifier on the case record; it does not change when the case number does, which makes it the safest key to track on.

5. 5

   Search by crime number

   Both seats search by Crime/ST Number, and both want more than the FIR number: the number type (FIR No., Crime No., Case No., NCR No. and POSCO/PST No. among the options), the number, the year, the district and the police station.

Case types you will get wrong

Both seats share an identical vocabulary of 154 case types. The numeric ids match between the court's portal and eCourts, but coverage and labelling differ — eCourts adds the search aggregates CIVIL12 and CRIMINAL, which you cannot file under, while the court's Search Pending Case by Year and Number list carries DUMMYC and DUMMYCR, absent from eCourts. Allahabad's split of the civil writ jurisdiction drives which bench hears you; the Writ A/B/C definitions below come from the court's Constitution of Benches roster.

Almost every type has a D twin — FAPL/FAPLD, CRLA/CRLAD, A372/A372D, ARPL/ARPLD. Under the Rules of the Court, 1952, Chapter IX, Rule 2(2), a defective appeal or application goes into a register of defective cases, and once the defect is removed it is entered in the regular register and numbered. The consequence people miss: the case number changes on cure. Your FAPLD number stops updating not because nothing is happening but because the matter is now a FAPL with a fresh number. Track both, or track the CNR — and at Lucknow use the registry's Status of Changed Case Type / Case Number tracker, which maps the old reference to the new. Prayagraj has no equivalent. For special appeals specifically, the Rules require defective appeals — deficiently stamped, barred by time and the like — to be listed for orders within a week of institution (Chapter IX, Rule 10(xiii)). The registry also publishes a List of Defects Reported by Stamp Reporting: missing affidavit coupon, unreadable annexures, unsigned dates-and-events.

Downloading orders and judgments

Judgments and orders for both seats are searchable and downloadable free from eLegalix at elegalix.allahabadhighcourt.in; Court Orders on eCourts is the second route. Both give an ordinary copy.

A certified copy is a separate, paid registry process, applied for on a folio at the copying section. The website offers the Computerized Copying Folio Application Status tracker at elegalix.allahabadhighcourt.in/elegalix/WebStartFolioSearch.do — a status page, not a download page.

Neutral citation: the format is Year:AHC:Number for Prayagraj and Year:AHC-LKO:Number for Lucknow, with a -DB suffix for Division Bench and a -FB suffix for Full Bench judgments — for example 2024:AHC:149752, 2025:AHC-LKO:6955, 2024:AHC:84015-DB and 2024:AHC:109996-FB. The suffix records bench strength, so a citation without it is incomplete rather than misdirected — but registry and database lookups may fail to match it. Reproduce the citation exactly as printed at the head of the judgment.

Cause lists

Each seat publishes its own, and the flow is the same at both: choose a List Type, then a Listing Date from a dropdown offering only dates for which a list exists, then search by Court number, Counsel name or Advocate Roll Number.

The list types differ. Allahabad offers Combined Cause List, Fresh Cases, Additional Cause List, Supplementary Fresh Cases, Daily Application (IA) List, Application (Correction), Weekly List and National Lok Adalat. Lucknow offers those plus a separate Daily Cause List and Backlog Fresh Cases. Neither seat offers a Permanent List — that tile is commented out of the live markup at both — and mediation lists sit on the hub, not on either seat page.

Neither page displays a "published at" timestamp, so the date dropdown is the only reliable indicator of what has been released.

Quirks specific to the Allahabad High Court

• Two seats, two systems

  Prayagraj sits on allahabadhighcourt.in, Lucknow largely on hclko.allahabadhighcourt.in; a process built only against the principal seat silently misses every Lucknow matter.

• Roster churn

  The Constitution of Benches is reissued frequently and assigns jurisdiction by writ sub-category — down to "Writ C – Land Acquisition" or "Writ A – Transport". A roster change moves your matter to a different court number without any change to the case, so read the current roster.

• Filing number before case number

  A freshly presented matter has a filing/token/diary number and no case number until registration. Use Search by Filing Number during that gap — not the Search by Filing/Token/Diary Number entry, which is a separate off-site page.

• Captchas

  The case-status search forms at both seats require a captcha — which is what makes daily manual checking unsustainable across a portfolio.

Common questions