As children, when we wanted to play, we would knock on our neighbours’ doors to call them out to play— learning, fighting, and creating games together. However, as we grow up, we end up forgetting about the joys of play and improvisation.

The pandemic had served as a wake-up call, revealing the failures of our existing systems, including the justice system. We realized the need to actively play, participate and elevate our efforts. To shape a justice system that serves everyone, we realised the need to form a team of like-minded individuals who are ready to play, fight, and innovate together. But how do we find such peers who can challenge us and themselves; and attract more people to join? The Agami Prize and Agami Summit seeks to find just that.

Through our extensive Prize Process discovered fourteen remarkable initiatives out of 648. This process offered us the opportunity to connect with potential teammates and gain valuable insights. We hope these connections and insights enable you to navigate the field of justicemaking and make significant progress in the ideas you are passionate about.

Rethinking Justice - The Deeper Questions 

We as a society have been in this business of ‘delivering’ justice for so long that, for the most part, we invest our energies in advancing ‘how’ it must be delivered - to become more accessible, inclusive or efficient. Few of us step back to ask the deeper questions: what is the point of the justice system itself? What is its goal? Are some of the ideas, beliefs and assumptions behind those goals sound? 

We are seeing a new breed of justicemakers asking just these questions. For instance, Enfold and Counsel to Secure Justice are challenging the assumption that punitive action against a harm-doer serves justice for anyone: the victim, offender or society. Instead, they are exploring what justice processes would look like if the goal of justice delivery evolved to restore and heal all the actors involved. Similarly, One Future Collective is challenging the assumption of a uniform idea of what justice looks like for all victims. They seek to serve ‘contextualised justice’, which offers a choice to a victim to choose her pathway to healing and secure justice - whether that means mental health counselling, healing circles or a lawyer. This new breed of justicemakers— most of whom are women— are learning and investing in themselves and a community of practice to develop fundamentally new capabilities and craft than what is taught in law schools. 

Jawabdehi Andolan is also bringing a different and critical dimension of justice delivery that is currently missing in our justice system. All laws and processes are either designed for (a) the state to hold citizens accountable for their actions or (b) for citizens to pursue institutional structures to secure rights and ensure the delivery of justice. Jawabdehi Andolan asks— What is the framework to ensure the state’s accountability? They have pioneered a set of principles (aka the ‘Bhilwara Principles’) that include advocating for institutionalised processes to create a level playing dialogue between the state and citizens (through the Jansunwai mechanism). They have also been advocating for an Accountability Law in the State of Rajasthan that places the site of accountability with public functionaries and establishes a structured grievance redressal mechanism. The Rajasthan State Government has recently published this Bill for public comment. 

Though these practices and ideas are at an early stage, they hold a lot of promise. As disputes and conflicts grow exponentially in a fast-changing society, we need to invest in radically different models that compassionately serve our communities. Through them, we can learn and evolve even better approaches. 

Developing the New Social Change Infrastructure 

There is a new class of solutions that recognises that the Access to Justice challenge in the country cannot be solved by one product or service alone, however transformative it may be. They seek to enable many solutions and changemakers, at every level, however big or small, to make a dent in the problem by serving as a societal infrastructure that empowers local changemakers. Often these solutions are a potent combination of technology and special networks of human change agents with the relevant knowledge and tools that can easily enable a variety of problems to be solved by those that understand them best.  

Aadiwasi Janjagruti is a network of mobile-savvy adivasi youth that are using their smartphones to make videos and build or support a wide range of local issues that are brought to them; Haqdarshak is using technology and enabling a cadre of women haqdarshaks to ensure last-mile delivery of services. Nyaaya, which developed a specialisation in legal literacy content, has built a network that includes local organisations, regional experts and law school clinics to create a system response to local legal needs. Through its IVR technology and ‘local media clubs’ run by volunteers, Mobile Vaani is supporting not just one use case but a wide variety of social use cases, from people mobilising around the failure to develop a local government school to developing an organic campaign for better implementation of MNREGA in the district.

Whether or not these social change infrastructure providers, or societal platforms, as they are also known, include digital public goods, i.e. technology that others can openly and freely use to build or adapt their tools, there is also the concurrent growth of digital public goods such as the Beckn Protocol (a set of open protocols to create open and decentralised digital ecosystems) and Bhashini (a National Public Digital Platform for languages) that could supercharge these societal infrastructures. 

More such societal infrastructure solutions that are user-centric, interoperable with each other, and contextualised will enable millions of people to participate in the goal of access to justice. When a critical mass of such architecture becomes available in a region, people’s likelihood of solving their problems increases exponentially. This adaptive and scalable societal infrastructure could serve as a vital complement to government institutions or even large civil society organisations.

In-House Driving Innovation in Legal Industry 

Until recently, the in-house legal function was primarily seen as a conservative secretarial function. It served an important role but was not seen as a centre for legal innovation or business strategy. Even as recently as pre-COVID, there was a widespread presumption that law firms or practitioners would drive most legal innovation. The actual experience has turned this on its head. 

Enterprise legal has been the biggest driver of legal innovation, innovating its role inside companies in the process. Most Indian legal-tech solutions reached the growth stage because of their adoption by enterprises. 

In debt management, adoption by the financial services enterprises has powered the rise of Credgenics; in Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), the buy-in of leading banks has led to the early success of SAMA, CORD, and Presolv360; in property management, the support of leading housing finance companies has nurtured TEAL, in digital document workflows, enterprises digitising their onboarding and customer management have driven the growth of Leegality and SignDesk; and in case management, the adoption of enterprises with large litigation portfolios has supported Provakil, Legistify and Flywork. The spending of legal departments has also increased exponentially. Legal professionals who could easily find a place in top law firms, in India or abroad, have chosen to head up legal departments, steadily transforming the pay and status of the role of the General Counsel. General Counsels of leading companies are also actively engaged in making their departments centres of innovation and supporting innovation in the broader legal ecosystem.  

Breakthrough Legal Products Addressing Business Needs at Scale

The onset of contemporary legal tech in 2017-2018 was about improving legal function with business innovation. ODR was about taking mediation or arbitration online; legal research was about finding precedents easier; contract tools focused on drafting; and legal marketplaces focused on discovering lawyers. The large-scale opportunities to unblock and accelerate business could not be seen due to a disconnect between the innovators and those with the best grasp of the problem. In the last two years, a new generation of providers has emerged who are improving business functions with scalable legal solutions. They have identified fast-moving, high-volume use cases that help businesses of all types operate more effectively. 

For instance, Lawyered has developed an end-to-end legal support solution for truckers taking a fee from logistics networks; Credgenics helps financial services companies minimise credit defaults by engaging borrowers and even providing mediation solutions if needed; CrimeCheck offers vital information about people’s criminal histories to enterprises seeking to lend to them, hire them etc.; and TEAL is equipping housing finance companies to quantify risk around property titles better.

These providers have also realised that most users require solutions for their entire theatre of work instead of a fix for a single step. So, legal professionals don’t just need better search but drafting support, practice management, lead generation and more. Enterprises with a high volume of contracts need assembly, review, management and analytics. Those with large litigation portfolios need case management, legal professional discovery and workflow management, case research and analysis, and litigation support. In short, clients want to be able to do many things within the same product environment or across highly interoperable product environments. 

We are seeing the rise in such solutions where SignDesk has developed end-to-end document workflow solutions that address document assembly, review, registration, stamping and signing. Legistify enables enterprises to manage their cases and contract professional ecosystems end-to-end. Provakil has developed full-scale practice and case management solutions. 

There remains some space for critical-step solutions to work seamlessly across different systems and stakeholders, as has been shown by Leegality. Leegality has developed an industry-leading signing solution that works with multiple other document ecosystems allowing it to begin its product development journey across different domains.  

Creative resourcing for rights-based initiatives

Changes in legal regulation, shrinking foreign funding and shifting strategies of philanthropies have all adversely affected the landscape of funding for rights-based initiatives in India. The repercussions of COVID-19 added new complexity to the field. In this challenging context, we see justicemakers creatively staff and resource their efforts.

Aadiwasi Janjagaruti, an initiative based in Dhadgaon, Maharashtra (mentioned earlier), has kept its costs and overheads low by engaging with youth volunteers and met the incentives needed for their community and their small overhead costs by crowdfunding small amounts from the villagers (INR 15-20 per head), ad earnings on their YouTube channel (between INR 2000-5000) etc. A team member recently contested in the Panchayat elections and won to become the sarpanch with funding of just INR 50,000. Similarly, MAKAAM (Mahila Kisan Adhikaar Manch), a nationwide unregistered collective of 100+ organisations and individuals doing very powerful work to secure the rights of women farmers in India, has only one program manager, whose salary is supported by funding crowdsourced from the community. All their other members are volunteers. Global Care Foundation, based in Mumbai, meets some of their funding needs for their work in prisons, by crowdfunding, particularly during festivals, leveraging the Zakat principle in Islam that particularly encourages contributions towards releasing prisoners or those in bondage. 

While more systemic efforts need to be made as a sector to unlock needed capital, these strategies exhibit not only the creativity of resource efforts but also a means to enhance community ownership over the initiatives.  

Innovation in Dispute Resolution Pathways Gains Momentum

The ecosystem to provide citizens with different pathways to resolve their grievances and disputes is growing. 

Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) in India has deepened its penetration and has reached a tipping point. It has extended its application to Online Lok Adalats, Motor Vehicles Tribunals, Tax Offices, Customs Offices, and many more state fora. This is over and above the private ODR services now widely used by banks, NBFCs, e-commerce companies, and more. New digital ecosystems, such as Account Aggregators in finance, payments, and the Open Network for Digital Commerce in e-commerce, have native ODR solutions to which users can take recourse, picking their choice of providers. It’s not just the ‘hearings’ aspect that has been digitised in these cases but often a complete process transformation, including dispute awareness, filings, decisions and appeals. 

Community-based solutions such as Aajeevika Bureau, Nari Adalats, Neev Shiksha Jankalyan Samiti leverage collective dialogue and mediation for addressing individual grievances and disputes, and initiatives such as Jawabdehi Andolan are ensuring societal infrastructure for collective grievances, state accountability, and other development agendas. 

Digitisation has also penetrated the consumer grievances space, birthing hybrid solutions such as Jagrook Upbhogta Manch, which uses a range of online tools to pursue consumer grievances and Voxya, which uses new-age communication tools and strategies to get customers the best resolutions of their complaints. Credgenics and Insurance Samadhan are intervening at the dispute prevention stage, using necessary behavioural nudges and processes to minimise financial defaults and insurance frauds.  

Courts have been making steady progress in improving the experience of lawyers and citizens. Several courts have enabled hybrid hearings, and many are now live-streaming critical hearings. The judiciary in Orissa has introduced Remote Witness Deposition Centres that allow experts such as medical officers/ police to depose their testimonies from the court nearest to them instead of travelling hundreds of kilometres. 

This diversity of transformation across the entire spectrum of dispute resolution, in combination with the imminent AI revolution, will change the landscape of grievances and resolutions as we know it. 

The Loud Chorus: The Need for New Capacities and Skills  

The justice system needs transformation— like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. And our capacity to achieve such transformation will be directly proportional to our embracing a whole new set of capacities and skills. 

Skills and capacities that enable us to go from passive understanding and following of precedent to imagining and creating new possibilities; to challenge the assumptions and beliefs on which our current justice system is built and imagine a new future that works for all of us; to go from being risk averse to risk-taking; and to go from being steeped in firefighting individual cases, to building our capacity to sense the larger system and act accordingly. Skills such as dialogue, mediation, and entrepreneurship, in conjunction with the capacities of empathy, creativity, self-awareness and leadership. 

The innovation trends show us that the new ideas around collaboration resolution, creative dialogue, restorative justice and justice leadership require as many citizens to learn these skills, but our current education system, including in higher education in social sciences, liberal arts and law, does not focus on these skills and capacities. As Otto Scharmer says, we need to create Universities (in whatever shape and form) that go beyond filling the ‘knowledge gap’. We need Universities that act as a platform to bridge the ‘knowing-being-doing gap’. That equips us to transform ourselves and our society by upgrading our mental and social operating systems: our awareness of ourselves and our ecosystem, our capacity to listen, empathise, and access curiosity, our capacity to courageously collaborate, lead, problem-solve and let go. 

We need to go from a few thousand justicemakers in society to millions representing the length and breadth of the country. If we cannot develop these much-needed skills and capacities, all we will have is a faster, more efficient caterpillar of a justice system rather than a butterfly.

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Death is not a pleasant subject and comes with its vast complexities. For those left behind, it’s a time of pain and grief. Yet, as life goes on, the family must also deal with the complex problem of succession, succession of property, wealth, and all that has been built in a lifetime. 

The problem of any inheritance process is manifold:

• identifying all the assets that are in place, the details of which are often unknown to the next of kin;

• having the necessary documents properly in place for a smooth succession process; 

• the instrument of succession, if any, being in place and how to go about implementing it; 

• and the most vexing of the lot - making a claim itself. 

During the pandemic, Mumbai-based management veteran Sejal Sheth and tech executive professional Soubir Bose started getting calls to help them with such inheritance-related queries, and the idea of EasyInherit was born. They aim to provide citizens with a one-stop solution for succession and inheritance-related issues.

On how EasyInherit was named

“How do we make inheritance easier, and, hence the etymology of the word, ‘easy’. A combination which said, can we use technology to help every citizen create a digital record of what they possess and can it even automatically discover some of these things?”*

Easy Portfolio

In the digital age, should it not be possible to create a single platform where all the deceased’s financial data, investments, bank accounts, and related identity documents are easily accessible to their next of kin? 

EasyInherit is invested in making this happen.

A digital space to store not only the details of all financial and asset data but also valuable things such as passwords, instructions for pet-keeping, and any other instructions to be left behind for the next of kin.

To ensure that such a platform is accessible to customers in the long term, they partnered with the Government of India’s DigiLocker to provide a space where a person can store all their data and documents for future use by their survivors. This allows individuals to store all their documents in one space safely. 

For EasyInherit, this is just the beginning. With the government and the Reserve Bank of India pushing for digitisation, they hope that one day, all such documents will become automatically available and updated - one of the many challenges of the current system. 

Easy Legal

EasyInherit also provides services for creating the necessary instruments to manage succession. In most cases, this is a will. In the more complex cases, this is a trust document. Customers can create a simple will by answering a few questions online. It also connects customers with lawyers for consultation in cases of complex wills and instruments and for any procedural aspect that must be taken care of, such as notarisation and registration of the will. On the online will creation space with easy consultation, customers can choose services from a range that will fit their budget. They are also assured of efficient service that will create such documents in a timely manner.

Easy Claim

EasyInherit also provides consultancy to help anybody through the process of claiming their succession rights. 

While their AI system can provide answers and is continually learning to provide a comprehensive and wide range of solutions - their customer management unit provides the backup.

They also have sample forms for each type of financial institution and a guide on completing them. For example, various forms, say succession certificate/legal heir certificate/letter of administration - all very different things, with what exactly would be applicable in each case being beyond the understanding of individuals or even financial institution employees. EasyInherit guides its customers through this process of finding out what would be applicable in each unique case. With more and more learning, their answers on timelines and difficulties in each varying jurisdiction also improve.

Both planning and claiming succession are tedious processes. Anybody who has gone through it knows the number of questions they have isn’t what a single person can answer, be it a family lawyer or otherwise. EasyInherit is the solution that is building this unique space.

Their continuing innovation, with hopes of further collaboration, consultation, and partnerships with the government and the RBI to make this process seamless and user-friendly, makes their vision: Easier Inheritance.

Note:

• *Soubir Bose, co-founder of EasyInherit, in conversation with Ritvik Lukose during Agami Prize 2022.

• Edited by Jahnavi Jayanth, Keerthana Medarametla and Supriya Sankaran.

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Sujoy had received his first bonus cheque at work. It had been a good year at this company for Sujoy; it was also his first year of employment. This meant he could finally start saving up. He went to the bank with his parents’ advice to open a fixed deposit. At the bank, a very friendly agent made him do the paperwork and explained how his money would grow with this fantastic product they were selling, saying, “It’s like fixed deposit only.” It would also include insurance coverage for his ageing parents. Sujoy took it, thinking his money was safe and growing. 

After the pandemic hit, Sujoy lost his job. 

Over the next year, he started getting calls to pay his ‘premium’. Panicked, Sujoy called up the helpline. He was told that what he had taken was a life insurance product which required Sujoy to pay for five years, and if he didn’t, he would lose all the money he had already paid. Sujoy begged and pleaded, saying he had been told clearly that he would not be required to make further payments; it was a one-time payment only. All in vain.

He wrote to the insurance company that had sold him the product and tried reaching the agent repeatedly - all for nothing. He then called Insurance Samadhan.

Sujoy is not alone. Misselling and fraud are rampant in the insurance-selling world. Being one of the most complex financial products to sell and with customers being the common man, insurance is a field notorious for pushing the boundaries of how a product is sold. Insurance products are sold aggressively, often disregarding whether the customer requires it. Further, making insurance claims is a nightmare in itself. Very often, citizens are unaware of why their claims are rejected and getting a complete claim reimbursed is akin to winning the lottery. These issues plague millions of citizens who don’t know how to address them.

With years of experience in the insurance sector, Deepak Bhuvneshwari Uniyal (co-founder) and his team at Insurance Samadhan are out to provide citizens with the right tools and redressal mechanisms to help with their insurance issues.

On misselling of insurance in the country

“You’ll be very amazed to know that we’re the only startup in the country, which is sitting on the unique data which insurance companies also don’t have because it’s only us who know which product is missold in which part of the country, how it is missold, and how to solve that. So that is our intelligence, which insurance companies for their own product don’t have. But we have that intelligence with us.”*

People like Sujoy can approach Insurance Samadhan, a web-based platform providing grievance redressal solutions for insurance issues. 

The process

Any complainant can contact Insurance Samadhan, whose experts judge the case's merit. Once accepted, they take on the onus completely. They draft the necessary complaint to be sent to the insurance company. If it is not resolved at that stage, they assist the complainant in filing a case before the insurance ombudsman. In the rare event that the ombudsman not passing a favourable order, Insurance Samadhan helps the client file a claim before the appropriate consumer tribunal. They have solved over fourteen thousand such cases, and this number is growing. People like Sujoy have gotten their money back and are relieved. 

So, how do they do this?

Insurance Samadhan can achieve this because it is building an in-house tech engine and has built a strong network of partners such as insurance agents or financial advisors, hospitals and corporates. Their network of insurance agents and financial advisors reviews claims by customers facing any insurance grievance issues. They undertake the first level check on the authenticity and probability of claim settlement. Once such reviews are completed and found satisfactory, Insurance Samadhan takes over the process. 

Their network of hospitals and clinics refers patients who seek to challenge medical claims that have been rejected. Similarly, their network of corporates refers any customer or employees facing issues with their insurance to them.

Insurance Samadhan, thus, acts as the one-stop-shop for any insurance-related claims.

For this, they charge a nominal fee for registering the cases to move them forward, and in case of a favourable settlement, they take a percentage of the settlement amount. About sixty per cent of the matters handled by Insurance Samadhan are related to fraud or misselling of insurance, and most of the rest relate to insurance claims. If Insurance Samadhan cannot resolve the complaint, they will refund the registration fees.

Creating financially aware citizens

While providing solutions to aggrieved clients is the primary aspect, they are also actively working on providing knowledge and helping citizens understand their insurance needs. Their app, Polifyx, does just that. By uploading a policy on the app, a customer can analyse the various terms and conditions of the insurance, including the likelihood of their claims getting accepted or rejected. 

The app also allows customers to upload all their policies (or access them through their PAN or Aadhaar) to be stored in one place, such as the Government of India’s DigiLocker. Therefore, they and their nominees can efficiently navigate and manage such policies.

With access to various financial products becoming relatively more straightforward, insurance, an age-old sector, continues to thrive. With it, however, come the problems of misselling and oft-rejected claims. Insurance Samadhan provides a unique insurance management system that enables citizens to manage their insurance products and, ultimately, get due justice for themselves.

Note:

• *Deepak Bhuvaneshwari, co-founder of Insurance Samadhan, in conversation with Sachin Malhan, during Agami Prize 2022.

• Edited by Jahnavi Jayanth, Keerthana Medarametla and Supriya Sankaran.

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The start of the journey

Akshat Singhal started his first company in his second year at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. The company couldn’t scale due to debt-recovery problems, leading to Akshat spending a lot of time with lawyers. ‘Finding the right lawyer is hard’, Akshat realised. 

Most companies in India with reach across the country are susceptible to litigation. Consumer cases, cases of fraud by employees, disputes with partners, recovery cases, arbitrations - the types are numerous, and so are the various local courts and tribunals across a multitude of states in India. For a company with a small legal team sitting at the headquarters, it means managing each and every local litigation somehow. The challenges include but are not limited to finding the right hyper-local lawyer for the right jurisdiction and managing the entire litigation process. Managing the litigation workflow is a challenging process taking up much of an in-house lawyer’s time, from documentation to invoicing to the appointment of a lawyer to keeping track of the progress.

On identifying the key problem

“There’s a lot of challenges that a typical, normal Indian user essentially faces. Most importantly there’s a lack of trust - this is what our reading of the market is. I mean, even today, I have like thousands of lawyers registered on the platform but if I get into some sort of a legal trouble, I will think ten times before actually making a decision. Because I don’t have the required data set, I don’t have the required knowledge, I will have to rely on someone else’s local lawyer or family lawyer. We identify that as a huge problem. We want to really help these users.”*

This is where Legistify steps in. What started as one of India’s first DIY agreement platforms, Legistify, enables companies to find the right lawyer. This could mean a variety of criteria, the right jurisdiction for hyperlocal lawyers or the right subject matter, or the right experience or cost. 

Legistify partners with lawyers all over India to help companies connect with the right lawyer at the right price. On the one hand, it is an economic proposition for companies and on the other, it acts as a platform for client exposure for many partner lawyers who are first-generation lawyers. 

Legistify is also working towards templatisation and providing better technological solutions for partner lawyers. With the one-stop solution provision, Legistify has grown to have more than two hundred and fifty enterprise customers and more than seven thousand lawyers on board, managing more than ten lakh cases via the platform. All of this has generated more than twenty crores in revenue for the lawyers on the platform.

A complete litigation solution

Legistify has matured since then through its learning and has now pivoted towards being a litigation-management platform for companies. Along with choosing the right lawyer, Legistify provides the workflow solution for a company to manage its litigation seamlessly. 

As Akshat explains, every team in a company, such as sales or marketing, have their own workflow management product. Legistify caters to in-house legal teams by providing such workflow solutions. This is not limited to litigation. Their tech platform provides workflow support for the management of the companies’ intellectual properties, as well as the management of contracts.

Technology has become one of the critical game-changers in Legistify’s journey. It has taken the litigation process from updating individual cases through tedious processes, such as talking to the individual lawyer or looking at websites, to the platform providing the solution for such management. Legistify’s endeavour continues to be having the platform simplify processes for both the enterprises and the lawyers enrolled on their platform. To this end, Legistify is using the network and generated data to make better connections and provide more and more micro-level solutions, significantly transforming the legal experience for enterprises. 

Note:

• *Akshat Singhal, co-founder of Legistify, in conversation with Ritvik Lukose during Agami Prize 2022.

• Edited by Jahnavi Jayanth, Keerthana Medarametla and Supriya Sankaran.

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Terra Economics and Analytics Lab (TEAL) is doing for real estate what the Credit Information Bureau (India) Limited (CIBIL) score did for banking and financial institutions. 

CIBIL assists financial institutions in accurately assessing lending risks and brings individuals into the formal credit economy. 

TEAL aspires to do the same for the real estate market; to develop a standardised, recognisable profile for each property based on land and property records. 

Any transaction relating to or involving a property requires title verification to establish the rightful legal owner and extensive due diligence to ensure that it is free of encumbrances. This is a critical process that everyone has to contend with for a range of things, whether you need to take a loan for or against a property when a property is transferred to legal heirs in matters of succession, and commonly while buying and selling any property.

The parameters for due diligence are extensive, costly and require significant manual intervention. In small ticket-size loans, lawyers may either be able to check limited parameters or not do any checks at all. This is reflected in the high volume of litigation related to land or property (it is estimated that more than two-thirds of all civil cases in India are related to land or property).

On the intent behind TEAL

“A lot of times we don’t even have proper infrastructure or connectivity, let alone the ability for a survey or a value/ title search clerk or a lawyer to go physically and inspect it (the property). That’s a very costly thing. Because margins are so low, a lot of times those don’t get funded by established players. They get informal financing or something, but the idea here is to make it cleaned up, accessible, ready, data-driven, independent and standardized to whatever extent we can. So that’s the intent.”*

Seeing this as an economics, legal and data problem all in one, Kshitij, Rohan and Shreyas started TEAL, a single searchable platform for property titles, to build transparency over the legal risk that is an inherent part of the real estate market. 

TEAL’s innovation lies in using big data and sophisticated machine learning models to simplify this complex legal process of title verification.

How TEAL works

TEAL relies on land records digitised by different government authorities and available in the public domain to collect as many different pieces of information about a property as possible into a single platform. 

This includes multiple data points from disparate sources, including title information from state governments who register property transactions, property tax records and mutations registered that are maintained by the municipality, checking for special permissions and unauthorised constructions from development authorities specific to a state, checking for ongoing litigations across High Courts, District Courts, Revenue Courts, Tribunals, geospatial data and cadastral maps that can be collected, and many variations of requirements depending on which urban or rural area in which state of India we are talking about. 

TEAL processes large volumes of unstructured data from several sources using machine learning models to make sense of it.

Currently, TEAL is dealing with more than a hundred million properties across sixteen states, over 330 districts, eight vernacular languages, and some remarkably obscure terminologies dating back to the Mughal era. It has resulted in the team creating libraries and data dictionaries internally to make sense of the big and varied Indian address problem and arrive at some form of standardisation.

All this is to make the records easily searchable to users. Their first user groups are banking and financial institutions, and they have secured the buy-in of credible and prominent actors such as ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Aadhaar Housing Finance, Tata Capital and Bajaj Finserv to use their platform for property due diligence.

A complementary part of their innovative approach is that they don’t limit themselves to high-value transactions or commercial real estate only, for which high-skilled professionals are hired, and extensive due diligence already happens. Instead, they find applicability in affordable housing finance because that is where risks are highest. Here, the time-cost benefit of intensive diligence doesn’t add up, and no market solutions work effectively. This segment urgently needs a title verification process that is quick, independent and trustworthy. TEAL’s approach is to grade every single property that they can. 

“Our intent was to go where most of the volume is there but also where a lot of the need is there,” says Kshitij. “For example, in Delhi, we have a lot of data for unauthorised colonies, for places where you don’t even have a formal title, but you may have ancillary data that can help you get there or triangulate who the owner is by using property tax records in some areas. They may not have a proper title, but some municipal service or utility payments will be made there.”

This is how TEAL solves the breakdown of trust that happens when good information is unavailable.

Notes:

• *Kshitij Batra, co-founder of TEAL, in conversation with Ritvik Lukose during Agami Prize 2022.

• Edited by Jahnavi Jayanth, Keerthana Medarametla and Supriya Sankaran.

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Access to justice need not be hindered by capital constraints. LegalPay has developed simple approaches to facilitate justice access by merely infusing capital, at the right time. 

Firstly, they offer litigation financing services, specifically stepping in to aid smaller businesses with limited financial resources. By providing funding for legal expenses, LegalPay enables these businesses to pursue legal action and level the playing field against well-funded opponents. More on this later.

Secondly, LegalPay offers interim financing to insolvent companies, allowing them to be assessed fairly under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code of India (IBC). This support helps these companies be evaluated as ‘going concerns’ (companies that will meet financial obligations), ensuring a more equitable process during insolvency proceedings.

Empowering Litigants

Litigation financing offers a solution for businesses and individuals hesitant to pursue litigation against larger organisations due to the high costs involved, such as advocate fees, court expenses, and other related costs. LegalPay provides financial assistance to parties involved in legal disputes through this instrument in exchange for a portion of the potential settlement or judgment. By bridging the capital gap and offering access to capital, particularly for startups and companies with limited financial resources, litigants are able to pursue legitimate claims.

Also, contrary to traditional means of funding, such as high-interest debt, the arrangement of LegalPay’s funding is non-recourse in nature, meaning that repayment is contingent upon a successful outcome. This arrangement shifts the risk from the plaintiff to the litigation funder, mitigating the financial strain on the litigants during the legal process.

Thorough Case Evaluation and Claim Validation

For each case, LegalPay conducts a thorough internal evaluation of the parameters of the case. This includes legal merit, the advocate involved, financial due diligence and others. Once the claim is validated, LegalPay takes a calculated call to support the claimant’s case. This also enables litigants to thoroughly assess the merits of their claims, evaluate their chances of success, and help make a sound decision of whether or not to pursue a case.

“Agar main iss chhote se data point ke hisaab se bhi dekhun to humne kuch sau ghante bachaye hai court ke, agar logo ne usse pursue nhi kiya hai to. Doosra, whatever case which we have funded, there’s seventy per cent probability of settlement, kyunki sabko pata hai ki opposite party ko unka khudka lawyer lagega aur paise dene padenge, par yahan pe to third party ne fund kiya hua hai, so same validations, the case has got merit and teesra, ki paisa to mujhe aage dena hi padega so better ye hai ki chalte hai negotiate karke khatam kar lete hain, to wo saara ka saara impact humne create kiya hai.”*

Restoring Justice to Insolvent Companies

A company's fight to bounce back from bankruptcy isn’t typically what people would intuitively call a fight for justice. LegalPay, however, does. Companies that have run out of money undergo an assessment by their creditors, a process overseen by law, to either reinstate operations or be acquired at a fair value. LegalPay believes that anything that prevents companies from being assessed fairly as ‘going concerns’ is an injustice needing correction.

When a business becomes insolvent, it is essentially entirely out of liquid money (money it can spend). It can no longer sustain operations or pay its staff, so all production/services come to a grinding halt, and the staff leave or are laid off. Therefore, this business is no longer a going concern and can't be assessed duly.

This is what happened to a hospital in Bengaluru. Like many healthcare institutions, the hospital faced significant financial strain due to the increased costs associated with treating COVID-19 patients and the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. They came under the radar of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) - a law passed in 2016 - that assesses insolvent companies to gauge any chances of revival, of which usually there are none.

The IBC was formulated with the objective of restructuring rather than recovering. To this end, a Resolution Professional (RP) is assigned by the insolvent company's Committee of Creditors (CoC) to restructure and assess the chances of revival. 

However, the moment a company declares insolvency, it becomes difficult for them to raise capital to continue its operations and retain its employees, thus, leading to a situation where its assets start steeply depreciating in the decades it takes for IBC to complete the audit process. This, in turn, makes the company unable to be fairly assessed, and the creditors lose almost 90% of their investment. 

This is where LegalPay enters the scene.

A Win-Win Solution

LegalPay conducted a 15-day audit at the hospital: a thorough financial, legal, and leadership/management assessment of the hospital. First, their financial expertise allowed them to assess if the hospital had the potential to be profitable under the right management. Then, their legal expertise allowed them to gauge the legal merits of the hospital’s IBC case.

They then chose to back the hospital by offering interim funding to revive operations and rehire staff immediately. This funding also covers the cost of litigation. This gave the hospital two strong legs to fight for survival. 

A neat fact that works in LegalPay’s favour is even if the company ends up being liquidated, LegalPay legally falls first in the waterfall. So, they are the first to get their money back, making this hyper-secure for the interim financers.

An immediate injection of funds (and management change) swiftly revived the hospital’s operations. Within 7-8 months, the hospital was back to profitability, and it was acquired by a larger hospital chain that retained all its staff and patients. The creditors got back 100% of what they were expecting, and the shareholders got 50x more than what they were expecting.

This is how LegalPay intervened to circumvent the IBC’s 10-year audit process. LegalPay’s 15-day audit is now a 7-day audit.

Enhancing Access to Justice

Currently, LegalPay works with more than 200+ companies all over India and manages more than 2500+ Cr claims in different courts and jurisdictions, and this number is constantly growing. LegalPay’s brand of litigation financing has proven especially helpful for startups and MSMEs, who face the maximum amount of working capital issues due to bad deals, delayed payments and fraud. At this critical juncture, LegalPay stepped in and extended litigation finance to the MSMEs and startups, empowering them to successfully recover more than 85% of the disputed amount, along with accrued interest, within three months.

By bridging the financial gap, LegalPay helps equalise access to justice.

Notes:

• *Kundan Shahi, co-founder of LegalPay, in conversation with Ritvik Lukose during Agami Prize 2022.

• Edited by Varun Hemachandran.

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“Whenever a loaded truck meets with an accident, the drivers are in a situation of panic. More than saving their lives and getting help, they worry about the goods on the truck. Drivers and their employers stress out and end up paying huge amounts of money to ensure that the goods are either not seized by the police or to ensure that there is no theft of the goods,” says Lawyered. 

Commercial vehicle drivers are routinely stopped and harassed by cops. They face issues such as search-and-seizure or stoppage for things like an expired permit. Accidents are also common for millions of truckers on the road. This is reflected in the fact that the logistics industry bleeds thirty-five billion US dollars each year due to on-road legal issues.

This problem became even more visible during the pandemic when trucks were the only vehicles permitted to move. They faced harassment and several risks. 

Lawyered, which until then had developed a network of fifty-five thousand verified lawyers to connect with citizens, began to receive calls on various legal issues these truckers faced while on the road. These included harassment related to differing permits at multiple states that truckers met at every checkpoint. They realised that, invariably, if there had been lawyers by their side, they could have taken care of these mostly unnecessary issues. 

As they heard more, they realised these problems require on-the-spot solutions, not post-issue legal help.  

On the need for proactive legal help

“What happens in India, as far as legal acceptance is concerned, we are still years behind the developed countries, other nations. So here we hesitate in taking legal support, because of the plethora of reasons, stigma attached with legal industries is one of the main reasons. So that’s our mission, we need to bridge that gap and bring legal closure to the consumers at large by helping them solve their problems proactively rather than reactively.”*

Lawyer On-The-Spot (LOTS)

How do you put a lawyer inside every truck?

In collaboration with the All India Transporters Welfare Association (AITWA), Lawyered first created a 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. legal helpline that provided legal assistance to any truck driver. Quickly they learnt that truckers mostly need access to lawyers at night. So they evolved to create a round-the-clock legal helpline that truckers can call for legal support. They have also created a network, empanelling a lawyer for every fifty kilometres of the National Highways and roads connected under their own ‘BharatMala Project’. These lawyers are accessible even at nighttime.

The impactful innovation for LOTS is that it provides for the disempowered trucking driver community in a manner that traditional legal consultation can never do.

Having a lawyer on call to talk to the police and other authorities significantly helps these truckers manage and negotiate their issues. In almost eighty-nine per cent of the cases, having a lawyer on call, who can talk to the authorities directly, solves the problem immediately. In some instances where the physical presence of a lawyer is required, Lawyered provides a lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction through their network within two business hours. 

Because they partner with apex transport bodies like AITWA, Lawyered can make their services accessible to truckers and drivers. Truck-owning companies can choose from the various subscription plans available on LOTS to suit their requirements, depending on the number of trucks an owner has. This means not worrying about which truck faces what issue and where for the truck owners, as LOTS can cover all of them. Such partnerships have also helped Lawyered secure customers at scale.   

For the truckers using Lawyered services, it does not matter what time of day or midnight hour it is; they are assured of end-to-end incident handling by the LOTS team on the spot. With a fixed, reasonable subscription fee that is affordable to every trucker, LOTS provide a unique solution to the truckers’ problem. 

Beyond LOTS

Keeping in mind the deep-rooted problem in the logistics sector, Lawyered wants to stay focused on helping them with unique offerings such as LOTS, keeping in line with the needs of the industry. They are looking to first focus on the entire commercial vehicle space, ensuring and ultimately ‘insuring’ their on-road journeys from all known or unknown legal challenges and costs.

While the specific legal challenges on the road may vary, Lawyered has also extended their assistance to private vehicles, ensuring a more seamless journey for everyone involved.

Note:

• *Himanshu Gupta, co-founder of Lawyered, in conversation with Namit Oberoy during Agami Prize 2022.

• Edited by Jahnavi Jayanth, Keerthana Medarametla and Supriya Sankaran.

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Ideally, everything a state does for its citizens should automatically reach the citizens entitled to those rights. But this doesn’t happen in India.

How do citizens access information about schemes they are eligible for? 

How do they know the application process? 

How do they navigate bureaucracy, corruption and the tedious processes to access schemes?

How do they track the benefits they are entitled to?

Where do they go for grievance redressal? 

Five Hundred Schemes: One portal

A citizen has to go to five different websites to get information relating to social benefit schemes available to them from the central or local governments. Then they have to read complicated documents to understand what they are eligible for and know exactly where to go to secure them. Even then, the problems don’t truly end, as each scheme may require several documents, the filing of several papers, and follow-ups which can be cumbersome for citizens, especially marginalised citizens.

Aniket Doegar, the founder of Haqdarshak, saw this huge gap between the schemes available to the people of India and the relevant information that is accessible.

To make citizen access to such schemes easier, Haqdarshak created an AI-based platform to scan all relevant government websites for social benefit schemes and update them regularly.

Its AI-based rule engine allows laypeople to easily search and filter to discover what they are eligible for, even better, in their local language. So one can just put their details such as age and location, answer specific prompts and questions, and find out what schemes they are entitled to under current policies.

Haqdarshaks: a new cadre of justicemakers

A citizen’s more significant challenge is last-mile connectivity to securing their rights and entitlements. Application forms need to be filled correctly and then submitted to the right authorities - and they need to be continuously followed up on. The document signatures need to match; additional documents may be required from local authorities - the challenges are many and confounding. Very often, even before application forms can be filled, citizens realise they need essential identity documents like Aadhaar etc. and need help getting that. The more marginalised communities, often surviving on daily-wage labour, don’t have the time or access to the necessary means to do this.

Thus, Aniket realised that information alone left citizens with many challenges, especially on the documentation and process front. “Nobody was focusing on documentation for scheme delivery as a service. So that’s where in 2017-18, we decided to start service on our own,” says Aniket. Thus, Haqdarshaks came into being, a body of local community workers who are paid basic sustenance by the organisation to provide such services to the citizens. 

Haqdarshaks, the majority of whom are women, can reach out to the communities to provide end-to-end solutions for accessing government welfare schemes. Haqdarshaks also mobilise such services to go beyond individual citizens and help Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) access their rights and benefits. They help each individual and MSME at every stage, from the micro-details of various documentation and processes requiring completion to the process of applying for the scheme.

With volunteers on the ground, Haqdarshak transformed from being just a product and information supplier to a deliverer of service with the ability to support each citizen’s access to eligible social security. Over twenty-five thousand Haqdarshaks have been trained by the organisation, which has allowed them to impact more than twenty-five lakh individuals and over thirty-five thousand MSMEs across twenty-four-plus states. The organisation’s work has unlocked scheme benefits of over four thousand crores of rupees.

Tracking the benefits

It should be easy for citizens to track their applications for various schemes and get information on newer schemes they are eligible for. 

To make this easier, they introduced a card system personalised for each individual or MSME to store and track information on benefits received and provided. 

The cards are a huge step forward, allowing each citizen to have one card to track their government benefits - but there is still much to be done, Aniket feels. While some information is easy to trace, without direct or automatic information from the banks on account updates, such information also has to be updated manually. He has been looking towards the Reserve Bank of India and other banks to implement policies to ensure these cards become easy-to-use utilities in the future.

How the Yojna Card Works

“We will be able to use the Haqdarshak app end-to-end right from discovery to application and also tracking. The Yojna card then makes more sense because, the card after that one time sort of screening, any time I take the card to a Haqdarshak or a Haqdarshak franchise partner or to a yojna to scan the QR code, all my data is there and whatever services I want, can be utilised.”*

Creating Feedback-loops

Rights and grievances are two sides of the same coin. As Haqdarshak enabled more citizens to secure their rights, more grievances surfaced too. 

And this is where Yojna Kendras came in. These Kendras are physical spaces where Haqdarshaks congregate, and citizens come to request help or register grievances. Thousands of applicants come in, not knowing how to process underlying documents such as BPL (Below Poverty Line) cards or Aadhaar. The issues may be as simple as date mismatches or as complicated as obtaining paperwork for beneficial loans for the MSMEs - they look towards the Haqdarshaks for guidance.

These Yojna Kendras enable Haqdarshaks to reach thousands of citizens from one centre, making their service delivery more efficient and demand-driven.

Haqdarshak continues to grow, aiming to reach more citizens who need their help and ensure that the citizens continue to get the benefits available to them in the future.

Note:

• Madura Karnik, Chief Growth Officer, Haqdarshak, in conversation with Supriya Sankaran during Agami Prize 2022.

• Edited by Jahnavi Jayanth, Keerthana Medarametla and Supriya Sankaran.

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Apeksha* was forcefully taken away from her home and family at the tender age of six. Like lakhs of other young men, women and children, she had been trafficked to live the rest of her life in cruel slavery.

She was seventeen when she escaped and even made her way back to her family. She knew exactly who her perpetrators were. Despite that, fearing stigma and lengthy court proceedings, her family discouraged her from fighting her case.

By the time she found her will to fight her case, it was too late. The witnesses and evidence were compromised. But the process had exposed her to countless stories, just like her own, of other survivors of trafficking. 

She saw firsthand how the legal processes and policies designed to serve survivors justice had instead stacked all odds against them. There was no witness protection, and survivors’ families were threatened or worse if they testified. The victim compensation process was long and cumbersome. Young survivors who had been trafficked from one city to another found themselves having to return to their perpetrators’ city just for the court trials, away again from the safety of their homes.

Apeksha saw firsthand how the design of social processes to ‘rehabilitate’ survivors were deeply flawed. While Apeksha wanted to know how to fight her and her fellow survivors’ cases in court, the shelter homes made her sit in pottery classes. While she wanted to know how to carve her rightful place in society and not endure further stigma, the shelter homes taught her sewing. 

She also saw firsthand how the media treated survivors as nothing more than victims, only amplifying the stigma and discrimination survivors were already facing in society.

Why was this happening?

Because the survivors of trafficking were kept on the margins of the solutions and narratives purported to be designed for them, it’s no surprise that the solutions and narratives didn’t work for them at all. 

Apeksha decided to change that. She decided to claim her rightful place as a leader in shaping how India responds to trafficking. She was resolute. By securing justice for other trafficking survivors, she would find justice for herself. 

Reclaiming control and agency

Apeksha embodies several other survivors nationwide, all dissatisfied with how things are. Many began to form survivor groups and soon learnt about each other.

This culminated in the formation of ILFAT in 2019. A nationwide collective of over four thousand five hundred survivors, spread across India, working decisively on tackling trafficking, standing on two pillars:

(1) policy and advocacy through the lens of survivors and;

(2) building awareness and mitigating stigma through media and popular narratives. 

At the heart of their work, carrying the weight of it all, are the survivors who lead.

ILFAT is dedicated to making every survivor aspiring to lead - a leader for the sector. 

New survivors in ILFAT are trained in skills such as public speaking, facilitation, and communication, and more so, the survivors may articulate their points of view and carry forward the work of the forum.

Comprising thirteen collectives spread across nine states today, ILFAT operates in a democratic and federated model, with elected survivors acting as leadership council members.

Policy and Advocacy

India’s first national-level protocol for survivors of trafficking

Survivors started to see the need to show a collective force and present a cohesive narrative of survivors’ lived experiences and demands.

ILFAT became this united front pushing advocacy for a unified law incorporating the survivor’s lens and best interests. This entailed brand new processes and discourse on the legal prosecution of the perpetrator and monetary compensation to the survivor, such as allowing for virtual hearings so that survivors may stay in the safety of their homes; witness protection for the survivors and their allies; rehabilitation funds so that nobody may turn survivors away, etc.

Through advocacy, ILFAT is laying the framework for a national-level standard of what ‘victim-centric’, community-based, choice-based rehabilitation and reintegration of survivors can look like. 

Dictating their own stories and futures

Earlier, the media owned and shaped the narrative, “How did you get trafficked? What did they make you do?”

ILFAT is reclaiming the survivor’s story and dissipating stigma through media workshops & narratives in the country. In the words of a survivor, “When asked about that same old story [of how we were trafficked], we keep the story short and talk about our [advocacy] demands instead. That’s what they’ll have to focus on then.” 

Now, the media asks them, “What are your goals with your work? What do you hope to achieve?”

ILFAT’s members are not only equipping newer generations of survivors with the ability to fight their own battles. They’re also giving them essential and priceless information to reform the system to work better for them.

Note:

• *Names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

• Edited by Keerthana Medarametla and Supriya Sankaran

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In December 2021, over a hundred people drawn from different social movements in Rajasthan set off on a statewide journey, the jawabdehi yatra. They aimed to reach out to a multiplying crowd of people and communities struggling to realise their basic entitlements, farmers, daily-wage labourers, widows, and pensioners - in all thirty-three state districts. They sought allies and support for a social accountability law that the state government had promised.

Five years ago, in 2015-16, they launched a similar yatra that travelled through the state for a hundred days and gathered ten thousand grievances from the people. The yatra ended in a twenty-two-day dharna where, amongst many other demands, they raised a specific demand for digitised information on twelve and a half lakhs stopped pensions and related grievances. Through their protest and advocacy, they discovered that two and a half lakhs of these pensioners were classified as dead. In reality, over eighty per cent (in one block, for example) were alive. And a few of those that were indeed dead, had died after the government wrote them off as dead.

Some questions began to gnaw at the leaders of these protesting crowds: why did the people of India not even know what was happening to prevent them from realising their basic rights? Why did they have to protest and navigate extreme hurdles to enforce their rights repeatedly? Why is the liability of securing rights, at an individual and collective level, on citizens; with no accountability of those who are paid to enforce those rights and deliver basic services?

Jawabdehi Andolan stepped in and began asking: why isn’t the onus on the government to do their job? Why is there no process to enforce accountability of the state and its functionaries? And how do we now get them to carry out their mandate - do their job? Jawabdehi. Accountability. Andolan. Movement.

The movement’s song asks for jawab (accountability)

The Six Principles of Accountability to the People

Naturally, the framework for government accountability to the people came from the people - a group of young people of a sister-movement fighting Dalit atrocities, the Dalit Andolan in Bhilwara. Sharing the learnings from their lived experiences of enforcing their rights, along with the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) with whom they were allied, they laid down a six-principle path to accountability. 

1. Jankari (Access to Relevant Information): “Pehle humein jankari chahiye, sirf suchna nahin - woh propaganda hai. First, we want information relevant to us, not advertisements of schemes - that is propaganda.”

2. Sunvahi (Right to be Heard): “Doosri baat, jankaari bhi mil jaaye, toh iss desh mein sunvahi nahi milti. Secondly, even if we get access to some information, this country doesn’t let us establish a line of communication where we can speak in our voice.” They weren’t satisfied with letters or emails getting lost in the governments’ flooding post boxes and inboxes. They needed dated and timed proof that their grievance had indeed been heard and registered. 

3. Karwahi (Right to Time-Bound Grievance Redressal): “Teesri, sunvahi hai, to karwahi ki koi guarantee nahin. Third, if we manage to get our voices heard, there is no guarantee that we will get an answer in a fixed time frame. Are we going to get redressal? If yes, in what time frame? If not, why not?” 

4. Bhaagidari (Right to Democratic Participation): “Ab karwahi bhi ho jaaye, toh yeh afsar log apas me baith ke keh dete hai, tumhari shikayat me koi dum nahi hai. So, bhagidari chahiye. Now let’s assume that happens too. Next, we will hear bureaucrats deciding amongst themselves that our grievances are baseless. So we need to be able to inform them as they work to address our grievances. All sides need to be present in this process.” 

5. Suraksha (Right to Protection): “Iss desh me sabse pehle pitne wale toh shikayat-karta hi hai, toh humein suraksha chahiye. The first reaction of the power structure to a complaint is to suppress and even physically attack the complainant. The people who face the greatest lack of security in this country are rightful complainants. So, give us security.”

6. Janta ka Manch (People’s Platform): In addition to these five principles, MKSS added the need for a collective public platform for representatives of the state and citizens to dialogue for accountability. They argued that the people can only decide what’s essential to the people. In enforcing their right to participate in shaping solutions and policies concerning them, they were reclaiming power as democratic citizens.

Actioning the Principles

Historical Firsts

As the first step, the leaders decided they didn’t want to apply through physical forms for information when the government had it in digitised form. They wanted this information to be readily available and consumable to all.

The resulting solution after three years of intense advocacy for open access to digitised information, hidden for the most part behind ‘admin logins’, was the ‘Jansoochna portal’. A Rajasthan government-owned-and-operated digital platform where information regarding all public-related departments is accessible and consumable on a single platform. 

But this portal is unlike every other government portal out there. What goes on, when, and how isn’t decided by the government alone. The doorway stands on top of a ‘Janta ka Manch’. Every month, in a transparent and collaborative dialogue, civil society members, bureaucrat departments, and the IT department come together to discuss what information needs to go onto the portal and how it can best be laid out for citizens to consume. 

On the portal, while accessing 115 departments, 326 schemes, and 686 information on schemes, you read that this portal exists to aid the implementation and execution of Section 4 of the RTI Act. Its direct impact is reflected in over ten crore visits and eleven crore information downloads in just under two years.

Now, they’re moving towards actioning the other principles by proposing a law for accountability. Jawabdehi Kanoon.

In the ‘Social Audit Standards’ published by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), these six principles (now called the Bhilwara Principles of Social Accountability) have been mentioned and adhered to. The two official drafts of the accountability law in Rajasthan have also adopted these principles.

The advocacy of Jawabdehi Andolan has resulted in a commitment from the Government of Rajasthan and the Chief Minister of Rajasthan to pass an accountability law. In October 2022, the government put out a draft law in the public domain asking for comments. The movement has started reaching out to citizens to submit informed responses to pass and implement a strong and effective accountability law. The movement intends to press for it not only till it is passed but also to work towards ensuring effective implementation. 

Movements that Sustain

The Leaders of Jawabdehi Andolan are social movement individuals and organisations, networks, and communities across several sectors with varying interests and formations who have come together as the Soochna Evam Rozgaar Adhikar Abhiyan (SR Abhiyan) in the state of Rajasthan. 

They all believe that a movement’s energy comes from its individuals and the collectives who have the most at stake. They insist that social change has to come from messy alliances and slow, painstaking dialogue and co-creating - the real essence of democracy.

Now prominent in Rajasthan and spreading in different ways in many states, Jawabdehi Andolan’s theory of change is disarmingly simple, bring people together for democratic and constitutional rights, and let the magic unfold.

Note:

• *The Jawadehi Andolan team singing the ‘Jawabdehi’ song at the Agami Summit 2022.

• Edited by Keerthana Medarametla and Supriya Sankaran.

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Adoption in India takes much longer than it should; it’s a vividly problematic sight that most of us will have witnessed. Overcrowded shelters are full of orphaned or abandoned children who have also abandoned hopes of a childhood with a loving family and home. On the other hand, thirty thousand applications from hopeful parents are currently waiting in line, while only two thousand children are registered for adoption. 

Common sense tells us that these numbers aren’t adding up. 

So, Where Are India’s Children?

In India, orphaned, abandoned, and surrendered children have the right to be adopted under the Juvenile Justice Act if the Child Welfare Committee declares the child to be ‘legally free for adoption.’ This has not been happening as effectively as it must, and several deserving children are being excluded from the chance to be adopted for two reasons. One, ambiguity in the adoption law and two, severe resource constraints in the government departments responsible for this. As a result, thousands of children are forgotten, left to live their childhoods out in shelters providing them with a roof and three meals a day, but seldom more. 

On the intent

“In India context, for decades, India has been used to keeping kids in shelters and that’s been perceived as a good thing; so the idea is - a roof over your head, a meal in your stomach a day is enough. The child’s right to family, the child’s need to family and why every child must grow up in a family, that point was missed and that’s where we formed WAIC, that’s why we jumped into this work.”*

For instance, an abandoned child entered the system when she was six months old. Her adoption process began then, but she was never declared legally free for adoption. 

Three separate adoptive parents noticed several children like her when they first navigated the complex Indian adoption system to adopt children into their own families. Their paths converged in 2017 to launch Where are India’s Children? (WAIC).

That child is now ten years old and, thanks to WAIC’s intervention after ten long years, has now found a family!

Of the aggregate ~370 children WAIC has evaluated, around eighty-six have been declared legally free for adoption. These children would have otherwise still been waiting in line, potentially for all of their childhoods. 

A persistent and methodical solution

Upon studying the system with method and craft, WAIC realised their solution now had to be multi-pronged, simultaneously and parallelly plugging every gap and weakness in the system. While consciously tagging every player in the system along the transformation. 

Their work began with data collection, a tedious on-ground process requiring skill and tact to venture into child shelters and gather intimate and often sensitive information about children and their family statuses. So, next, they began hiring on-ground social workers to do this for them.

They took two critical decisions at this stage:

First, to make this process tech-oriented and to open source the tech.

And second, to work with on-ground NGOs (specialised adoption agencies) and the government by using already on-ground social workers to do this work. 

How tech plays a part

At this point, they developed their tech solution to analyse cases and swiftly recommend children who were common-sensically low-hanging fruit for adoption, i.e. when the details of their cases surfaced, one couldn’t help but see that they were obvious and urgent candidates for adoption. 

Concurrently, they’ve been building their network of government officials working in the system. At this stage, government officials have even recognised WAIC as playing legitimate and valuable roles in the official system, offering to direct government funds towards this outsourcing of work from the government to WAIC.

Lastly, recognising that the adoption laws need strengthening, they have now begun using their tech solution to gather insights on exactly how the laws need to change. They are now employing their network to engage in legislative advocacy while preparing to move on to judicial advocacy as well, as and when the need arises.

Today, they operate in Telangana and Maharashtra, collaborating with multiple NGO partners and government officials. Their long-term goal is to integrate these operations, tech-based and data-oriented, into the official Indian adoption system. 

In taking WAIC closer to this vision of India’s children finding loving homes, they say that they have already found their first big win. The workers at the agencies and shelters they work with have now begun approaching children’s cases with a subtle but powerful shift in mindset. Where they used to default to leaving children in the shelters, today they are defaulting to, first and foremost, asking how urgently each child can find a family. 

• *Smriti Gupta, co-founder of WAIC, in conversation with Maria Clara Pinheiro during Agami Prize 2022.

• Edited by Keerthana Medarametla and Supriya Sankaran.

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Building a community network - one individual at a time

Namita asked herself why she should be deprived of her father’s land. Her uncle indicated that she had no right to it. Deep in thought, she was listening to a programme on nutrition on Mobile Vaani, a community-based audio platform that she listens to often, when something clicked! She thought, “Why not post this question on Mobile Vaani?” 

So she asked on a channel dedicated to women in her community. Many women from her area responded with their views. One lady told her about a local lawyer, another about Namita’s right to property, and another - Namita didn’t like her - that the property should be left alone for the uncle. 

Namita did get in touch with the lawyer and was able to get her property. 

Namita was introduced to Mobile Vaani by her neighbour’s son Ankit, one of the volunteers working with the Mobile Vaani team. Just before the pandemic, Ankit had moved to the city to find work as a labourer. When the lockdown hit, Ankit had no way of getting back. It was Mobile Vaani, then, that helped Ankit return home. Audio programmes from Mobile Vaani partner networks on transportation issues, food availability etc., helped him return. The ability of the Mobile Vaani platform to collaborate with other social welfare organisations to bring the necessary and, more importantly, actionable information and help was key in helping Ankit. When he returned, Ankit became a volunteer for Mobile Vaani, at the local ‘club’ as they call it, to help his community. 

At the ‘club’, work was hectic. He began by helping spread the news of Mobile Vaani in his community. They had daily calls from community members raising local issues and concerns. Ankit’s job was to find a way to address those concerns. 

In some cases, he organised meetings for the community stakeholders and the ‘club’ to discuss and arrive at solutions. In other instances, he contacted various partners in Mobile Vaani’s network who could help. He was also responsible for organising local campaigns when needed, moderating the content the community was putting on Mobile Vaani, and mentoring other volunteers and other such ‘clubs’.

So, what is Mobile Vaani exactly?

Gram Vaani (the founding organisation) of Mobile Vaani has been working on expanding the network of community media platforms, collaborating with grassroots partners working closely with communities to democratise and extend its innovative multi-channel voice tech stack. The objective is to simplify information access, content discoverability and participatory approaches to community development.  

Built by Gram Vaani, Mobile Vaani is an audio-based social media platform that runs on any mobile phone, not just smartphones

It allows citizens to access the service through a simple missed call model (give a missed call to a ten-digit mobile number mapped to the service and get a call back immediately) or even through attractive data-driven interfaces like WhatsApp, Smart app or intelligent voice services (e.g., voice bot, voice Q&A etc.) as well. Like an IVRS (Interactive Voice Response System) consumer helpline, anyone can listen to information packaged as audio episodes through simple keypress inputs.

An audio-based platform like this, designed to operate on any simple phone, ensures reach to citizens who are illiterate or do not have access to smartphones or steady internet connectivity.

The platform enables members to easily record and share their thoughts as voice messages through keypress inputs.

On Mobile Vaani, you can find moderated community voices on hyperlocal issues, local news, and a grievance airing forum where community members and social workers can connect. All this allows fellow community members to meaningfully engage and interact with each other, share common grievances, and build solidarity across distances. 

On finding a shared space

“People who in a group setting, may not have the courage to ask some of these questions or have the sort of space to sort of listen to some of these topics, but they go back and listen to it at their own convenience and time. And more importantly, it gives them the courage when they listen to other people talking about certain challenges, like how Sultan said, “they build solidarity on these topics” and they’re able to know that, “I'm not the only one facing this problem, but there’s somebody else and I can also relate to it. I can share my experience and learnings and what I’m going through and learn from others’ experiences as well.”*

In the age of fifteen-second videos, Mobile Vaani stands out with its users listening to programmes of even up to eight to ten minutes, driven by the communities’ needs & demands. The audio nature of the platform, customised for local languages, breaks down communication barriers. 

Spread across thirty-five districts in India and growing, Mobile Vaani is a powerful social tool with a bottom-up approach for inclusive and community-led development. 

An emerging new social platform

At the heart of Mobile Vaani is the federated network or ‘clubs’, driving and fueling the tech platform. These independent clubs, consisting of ten to fifteen diverse volunteers, choose themes to focus on, such as media, agriculture issues, women’s rights etc. Mobile Vaani has over two hundred volunteers powering over thirty clubs across thirty-five districts of India. These volunteers, like Ankit, work within their communities, addressing local issues and holding local meetings. They also work with Mobile Vaani’s core team to provide information to the communities, work out approaches and solutions to various problems, and partner with other social welfare organisations. 

These volunteers are changemakers and are now becoming an essential and enabling platform for more than thirty other organisations, especially those serving justice, to work more effectively with communities on the ground. For example, Haqdarshak and Jawabdehi Andolan, finalists of the Agami Prize 2022, have also used the Mobile Vaani network to extend their reach within specific communities. 

With over ten to fifteen thousand calls daily, over a lakh unique callers monthly, six lakh voice reports generated on the platform, and thirty lakh plus individuals reached, Mobile Vaani continues to grow as a unique medium with a potentially manifold impact. By mapping and following the trends in individual stories and issues, Mobile Vaani is now providing insights that help build community-driven initiatives with local and higher levels of impact.

The ‘ground truth’, as they call it, in the form of community voice reports on various topics, plays a critical role in driving relevant policy conversations and changes.

Note:

• *Vijay Sai Pratap, co-founder of Mobile Vaani | Gram Vaani, in conversation with Ritvik Lukose during Agami Prize 2022.

• Edited by Jahnavi Jayanth, Keerthana Medarametla and Supriya Sankaran.

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“Our end game is to organise India’s five-hundred-plus fragmented schemes into a consolidated portfolio of four to five high-value entitlements that ensure delivery of ₹12000 per annum (₹1,000 per month) to every vulnerable and poor family in India.”

This is how Indus Action describes its 2030 mission.

Today, a woman from a low-income family who’s expecting a child or has recently given birth is entitled to benefits under at least three distinct schemes: wage-loss compensation and maternal health (PMMVY), maternal nutrition (ICDS)birth in a hospital (Janani Suraksha Yojana). If she is a migrant or a construction worker, she will also be entitled to benefits under the Building and Other Construction Workers Act 1996. The fragmented design of the five hundred-plus schemes launched by distinct ministry departments requires her not only to know about all these rights but also to apply separately for each of them and prove her identity each time.

On top of this, every single application becomes a nightmare to go through and follow up with, with ten transactions on average, because of government inefficiencies in the scheme execution processes. 

So why does India have so many schemes and transactions, counterintuitive as it feels?

The first reason is to reduce exclusion errors (accidentally leaving out eligible citizens). Secondly, in a country with such exorbitantly high levels of welfare needs, bureaucrats have resorted to being highly specific about what needs they are addressing so that they aren’t erroneously including people who don’t have social protection needs (inclusion errors). Trying to balance these two aims of minimising exclusion and inclusion errors, the State has just had to keep adding more schemes to cover more ground. 

Ironically, this has resulted in the State’s mechanisms having spread so thin that they don’t have the capacity to effectively design and implement over five hundred schemes in a user-centric manner for crores of individuals. 

Instead of focusing on building bridges to reduce friction and enable citizens to access all their rights, Indus Action paused and asked themselves, “What’s the end game here? Not ‘servicing as many schemes as possible’, but justice delivery. What is a better design for India’s welfare state? Rather than spreading itself thin across multiple schemes, wouldn’t it be better for governance to focus on a few strategic schemes and do them well?”

The leverage points for efficient welfare

It is rather convenient to say that focusing on a few is more likely to produce better results. But choosing those focus areas becomes critical to making this plan succeed and, specifically, asking what areas need conscious and concentrated focus to improve citizens’ welfare with a multiplier effect. 

Here’s where Indus Action elegantly steps in.

“Based on criteria such as high social return on investment and vulnerable moments in a citizen’s life cycle (moments that matter), we have chosen to focus on the implementation of the Right to Education (Children), Right to Food Security (Mothers), Right to Pension (Elderly Grandparents), Right to Livelihood (Migrant Parents), and Right to Health (Family)”, they outline. 

Building a stronger ecosystem for Rights and Entitlements:

Indus Action is not merely looking at servicing citizens with last-mile delivery. To work better, they have adopted three strategies to build the needed ecosystem for rights and entitlements (PoWER - Portfolio of Welfare Entitlements and Rights).

On building the capacity of the citizens

First, they build the capacity of the citizens to know their rights and share with the government exactly how their experiences in seeking these rights should be. Indus Action outlines a trajectory for citizens to be involved on all levels, from seeking information about rights to being community leaders spreading rights awareness to being co-advocates and co-designers in policy change. For instance, labourers that Indus Action initially engaged with on scholarship schemes for their children surfaced that schools claimed there was no such thing. Working together, they discovered that schools were facing issues with the government website when applying for these schemes and hence, weren’t processing them. The community leaders worked with Indus Action to resolve the case for the schools, and more than one and a half lakh scholarships and admissions thereafter began getting processed smoothly.  

This process of the community raising awareness of needed change has manifested in research that helps the State’s welfare mechanism ground itself on citizen-centric design for implementing schemes.

On building the capacity of the State

Second, they build the capacity of the State to deliver on these citizen demands. The transition from a disorganised and clunky five-hundred-plus scheme design to a boiled-down-to-fundamentals, highly sophisticated and collaborative design isn’t easy. To aid this transition and make it sustainable, Indus Action works closely with state government offices to hone relevant skills like collaborative leadership and design thinking. This work moves the State closer to implementing the needs that emerge from the citizens and making processes more citizen-friendly. One of the ways they have optimised processes, for example, is by supporting the design of consolidating databases of citizen data, so each family unit needs only to be validated once instead of every time they apply for a benefit.

On consulting workflows with the State

“We start with our diagnosis being shared to the government and that’s where we have the action-consulting part. We consult and co-create the process workflows and the eventual solutions with the state and with the state officers - right from decision-makers to frontline.”*

On driving systemic shifts

Third, equipped with learnings from both of the above and with both citizen and state allies, they are driving systemic shifts in the design of policy through either legislative routes or judicial routes. For instance, mothers (community leaders) who discovered that second-child deliveries didn’t get the same maternity benefits as first-child deliveries demanded they should. They had their first big win in February 2022. The government redrafted the policy to include second children as long as they are female, and the mothers have buckled down to push the scheme further to include all genders in the near future. 

Indus Action is currently working on three of the five focus areas - maternity rights, Right to Education (RTE), and migrant labour rights - methodically optimising their way through the five hundred.

Currently operating in twelve states with a forty-plus strong team and nearly a decade old, Indus Action maintains that this is a long-term game. Redesigning the very fundamentals of how welfare works in India is a status-quo-altering event and so needs to be a calibrated and collaborative effort.

Note:

• *Tarun Cherukari, co-founder of Indus Action, in conversation with Maria Clara Pinheiro during Agami Prize 2022.

• Edited by Keerthana Medarametla and Supriya Sankaran.

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Today, anyone can make a small film using a smartphone and free editing software. It makes video a convenient and easy-to-use medium for storytelling. In the hands of the Aadiwasi Janjagruti team, this has become a powerful tool for change for the tribal residents of Dhadgaon, an underdeveloped block in the district of Nandurbar in Maharashtra. 

Led by Nitesh, Rakesh, and Arjun, and over fifty volunteers, Aadiwasi Janjagruti is a hyperlocal media organisation where ‘producer bhi hum hai, consumer bhi hum hai.’

Videos are not an end in themselves but rather a means to make the people’s grievances visible and bring the government’s attention to issues that matter.

“Media village level pe nahi hai. Media block level pe bhi nahi hai. Toh isse kya hota hai ki transparency jo hai, woh nahi banti hai. Hand pump meri gaon ka kharab hai, toh mujhe CM ke paas jane ki zaroorat nahi hai. Hand pump kharab hai, Sarpanch banwa dega. Gram Sevak banwa dega. Uske liye CM ke paas jane ki zaroorat nahi hai. Similarly, BBC ko hand pump ke liye aane ki zaroorat nahi hai. NDTV handpump ke liye nahi ayenge. Hand pump ke liye gaon ka chota sa media organisation kaam kar sakta hai,” explains Nitesh.

Aadiwasi Janjagruti started when Nitesh arrived at Dhadgaon in 2016 on a State Bank of India fellowship. Along with college students and some local youth, he began making videos to create awareness about child marriage and child labour, sanitation, superstitions, and, sometimes, local welfare schemes that people in the area were eligible for. They shot on borrowed phones and asked their neighbours and friends to act in sketches they wrote or made up. These videos were made for compelling local content and were an instant hit amongst the people.

Soon enough, something interesting started happening. People started sharing their problems. Problems that ranged from roads not built, to daily wage work not being available, to bribes they had to pay to get the money that was rightfully theirs under various schemes. That’s when the team started making videos about people’s issues, identifying beneficiaries, and relaying their needs to the government. 

In the process, they also started to uncover and solve systemic corruption that was taking place.

For example, they learnt about people’s challenges while accessing their welfare money through mini-banks. Or while they tried to get an FIR registered in cases of physical harm or more sensitive matters of rape and murder, where police and other authorities were refusing to take necessary action to file a case and start legal proceedings.

Each time, they use video interviews of the aggrieved persons to bring out the facts of the case. These videos are then typically published on their YouTube channel and circulated over WhatsApp, reaching just about everybody in the locality and making it impossible for authorities to take no action in the face of injustice. 

In a place rife with corruption and nothing gets done without money exchanging hands, the fact that the Aadiwasi Janjagruti team can get ‘paise ke bina nyaay’ has won them the trust and appreciation of the people. This, and the fact that they are young, local volunteers with no legal background, using media instead of any traditional tools of law to secure justice for the people. Institutions also know they cannot keep operating in the dark as they always have; their actions and inactions that can be brought to light in a short video.

These days, whenever something big or small goes wrong, people first call a local volunteer from the Aadiwasi Janjagruti team for assistance.

There are volunteers to be found across the 166 villages in Dhadgaon. They are the faces or the ‘leaders’ of Aadiwasi Janjagruti for their villages— meaning they serve as the first point of contact and support for any issue.

Even the core team and founders always engage with the villages via them. It is a kind of experimental, distributed leadership, serving justice to the people closest and around. The volunteers’ sense of ownership and responsibility towards their community shows that while all of them hold other jobs - when it comes down to it, and there is an immediate need - their role as members of Aadiwasi Janjagruti takes priority. 

On activating leadership in the community

“Hum kya kar rahe hai, hum chah rahe hai, aise chhote chhote media organisations, village level pe baney, jo self sustainable ho. Leaders, humein kuch aur create karne ki zaroorat nhi hai, sirf chhote chhote aise leaders banane ki zaroorat hai, har gaon mein, agar wo leader create ho gya na to wo pure gaon ko change kar sakta hai, sirf ek do aadmi hi change kar sakta hai, bahot pure gaon ko change karne ki zaroorat nhi hai. Humare liye ye important nhi hai ki wo successful ho ya failure ho, humare liye ye important hai, mere liye personally, jo wo aadmi utha raha hai na, usko ye rahe agli baar wo khud se uthaye, mere paas na aaye, pehla. Doosra ye hai ki, wo utha raha hai na, bhale hi wo story, bhale hi wo success ho ya fail ho, uske mann mein ye baat aa jani chahiye na ki main utha sakta hun ye baat.”*

In turn, the community shows their support by partially funding the organisation - through small amounts voluntarily contributed by the people and advertisements from local tea and sari shops, alongside small award money and monetising their YouTube channel. 

This has been a conscious approach of the founders, making the community an essential stakeholder in their work. For them, the organisation is nothing. 

They want to focus on building a network of local leaders who feel capable and confident about solving their own and their communities’ justice issues. After all, as they say, “Hume Dhadgaon ko banana tha. Uss process mein Aadiwasi Janjagruti ban gaya.”

Notes:

• *Nitesh Bhardwaj, founder of Aadiwasi Janjagruti, in conversation with Supriya Sankaran during Agami Prize 2022.

• Edited by Jahnavi Jayanth, Keerthana Medarametla and Supriya Sankaran.

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According to the Prison Statistics India 2021 National Crime Records Bureau report, three out of four prisoners in Indian jails are undertrials. Many of them come from marginalised communities like scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, backward castes, as well as nomadic tribes who have no access to legal representation. The empanelled lawyers of district legal services authority or pro-bono lawyers of NGOs, who work hard to ensure that the pleas of the undertrials are heard without delay, have limited access to visits inside the prisons to identify who needs free legal aid.

So who has unlimited access to undertrial wards inside the prisons? 

“So in the year 2016 and 2017, as Praveen Ji was telling that at that moment of time, when we were working inside the prisons in an individual capacity, we identified that it was very problematic to work for such a large number of under trials who were detained inside the Beur Central Prison where there were six thousand under trials and convicts. So, we thought - why not to form a group who are convicted as well as under trials, who are ready to volunteer themselves, so that there is someone apart from us inside the prison who can give us information about the legal documents process and about who are the marginalised communities that really want to get free socio-legal aid services.”

It is the convicted prisoners who are serving their punishment in prisons. They are neither bound by visiting hours nor restricted from visiting other wards or speaking to other inmates. They can move freely between prison wards and thus have better accessibility to identify those who need socio-legal assistance. These convicted prisoners can then work with them and orchestrate their legal documents.

This is the insight fueling Praveen Kumar and Shubhendu Shekhar’s work at LAW Foundation. They set it up as a socio-legal initiative that identifies and trains convicts to be jail paralegal volunteers (JPLVs) who can help their fellow inmates with their legal cases. 

Earlier, LAW Foundation was working with the undertrial inmates as volunteers, but it was not sustainable because the undertrials were either released on bail or were acquitted. On the other hand, working with convicted prisoners helped establish a second line of leadership. This clean, lean model to leverage the untapped talent of convicts in prisons for legal aid is a conflation of effective systemic planning and relational trust.

Empowering the JPLVs

The JPLVs are trained in the basics of the legal process and documentation, as well as in identifying inmates who need socio-legal assistance. They are trained in filling vakalatnama, surety bail bond forms, preparing affidavits and writing Personal Recognizance (PR) bail bond applications. Many times, the PR bail bond applications are often prepared by the JPLVs themselves and given to the undertrial inmates going to their court hearings. They often bridge the communication gap between the district legal services authority and the concerned inmate. 

Additionally, the JPLVs have been granted full access to the internal prison website portal as the jail authorities, where they upload and download relevant documents required in the particular case. The prison authorities have given the JPLVs access to the legal aid clinic telephone so that they can communicate with the district legal service authorities and the LAW Foundation team members regarding the updates of different cases. 

In turn, the work done by these convicted prisoners (JPLVs) offers them a sense of structure and routine in their life. JPLVs have been in prison for so long that a feeling of camaraderie develops between the inmates. Since they know getting out of prison for themselves before serving a sentence is impossible, there is a sense of satisfaction and happiness in helping their fellow inmates. They believe in the idea of prison being their home while prisoners are their family members.

Some of this unprecedented access comes from the time that Shubhendu and Praveen spent working in the prisons and building a rapport with the jail and legal services authorities along with Hon’ble High Court and District Court judges who all determine the well-being of prisoners in jail. 

However, there is always a conscious effort towards making these relationships long-lasting. Whenever new officials come to these posts, the team makes a joint effort to meet them and share the idea of the work to keep it running smoothly. Additionally, they always seek a memorandum of understanding between the prisons and the organisation. 

The LAW Foundation team now visits the prisons only twice a week while the JPLVs keep all the documents ready for the case, and together they write down the facts and narratives. The team returns to their office to discuss the issue, reads the FIR and charge sheet if required, and then explores options for legal recourse. A petition is filed at the concerned court through a panel of pro-bono advocates. 

Today seven long-term convicts work as JPLVs across four district jails in Patna, Bihar. They have handled five hundred legal aid cases, including preparing seventy applications under the Code of Criminal Procedure for personal recognisance bonds.

Praveen believes that the idea of jail paralegal volunteers is sustainable in itself. “…because we have seen that if one volunteer works inside the prison, he can motivate the other convicted prisoner who is also willing to work voluntarily in the system. So it creates a kind of team of teams inside the prisons.”

Shubhendu believes that the idea of a jail paralegal volunteer is a catalyst for innovatively transforming the law and justice system.

Note:

• *Shubhendu Shekhar, co-founder of LAW Foundation, in conversation with Maria Clara Pinheiro during Agami Prize 2022.

• Edited by Jahnavi Jayanth, Keerthana Medarametla and Supriya Sankaran.

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