The Samvidhaan Fellowship

Those Indians who are most in need of legal assistance face several barriers to accessible, reliable legal information, leading to a wide gap between what the Constitution of India promises and what it delivers. Some of the barriers that people face are:

• Lack of awareness: About the fact that the problem they are facing is legal and how the law applies to their situation.
• Lack of access to information: Most citizens are not sure about where to get legal information, other than by contacting a lawyer. When the legal information is available, it is complex, mostly in English, and filled with jargon. Over 30 crore Indians cannot read and only 10.6% of the population can speak English.
• Complex process: Each legal issue is governed by a complex framework of central and state laws, notifications and multiple justice delivery forums, making the whole process of accessing justice extremely daunting.
• Heavy financial burden: The cost of engaging and/or consulting a lawyer is very high and unaffordable to many.
• In addition to the above, multiple factors like a user’s identity, income, social status, geographical location and level of education also affect their experience of interacting with the law and engaging with their constitutionally protected rights.

Nyaaya is an open-access digital resource that provides simple, actionable, reliable, and accessible legal (SARAL) information to help Indian citizens navigate their lives and solve legal problems. Nyaaya was conceptualised by Rohini Nilekani and is incubated at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. In the past five years, Nyaaya has consistently provided simple and accessible legal information on topics across themes such as Police, Government, Health, Family, Violence, and more in English, Hindi, and Kannada.

Nyaaya partners with grassroots organisations to add suitable context to the legal information for their beneficiaries. Every organisation that Nyaaya has worked with emphasized their beneficiaries’ overwhelming need for legal assistance from a local legal expert to help them navigate the system. To fill this gap, we conceptualised the Samvidhaan Fellowship with the theme of Making Justice Mechanisms Accessible.

Every organisation that Nyaaya has worked with emphasized their beneficiaries’ overwhelming need for legal assistance from a local legal expert to help them navigate the system. To fill this gap, we have conceptualised the Samvidhaan Fellowship with the theme of Making Justice Mechanisms Accessible. We do this by partnering with grassroots organisations to create accessible contextualised legal information for their beneficiaries to suit their context.

This Fellowship will primarily be field-based. Fellows will need to either be located in Karnataka or should be ready to relocate there. The duration of the Fellowship will be 12  months. The Fellowship can be extended for another year based on the performance of the Fellows.

A Samvidhaan Fellow:

1. Is a highly skilled lawyer working at the grassroots who is fluent in Kannada.
2. Has a minimum of three years of litigation experience.
3. Takes up cases pertaining to women and children and represent them in appropriate legal forums
4. Has subject area expertise in labour rights, gender rights, or rights of marginalised communities .
5. Has worked on grievance redressal and understands the process.
6. Has demonstrated interest in legal awareness work in the past.
7. Has an understanding of social protection schemes and entitlements.
8. Is willing to build community skills on identified issues.

Primary Tasks

1. Conduct legal awareness and capacity building sessions in association with KSLSA, WCD(Karnataka) and Nyaaya’s partner organisations focussed on empowering  targeted communities to understand and claim their rights and entitlements. 
2. Help women and children navigate the justice system and also take up cases on their behalf (cases of community members referred by partner organisations or of those who approach Fellows for legal aid during awareness sessions), and represent them in appropriate legal forums in Karnataka
3. Answer questions received from beneficiaries of grassroots organisations that Nyaaya collaborates with.
4. Identify issues concerning communities of partner organisations that require pro-bono litigation,policy intervention or strategic guidance for collective action and implement them with the help of Nyaaya.
5. Provide capacity building for partner organisations, volunteers, and community reporters on legal issues. 

Secondary Tasks  

1.  Help create contextual,legal awareness content in their regional language for Nyaaya’s online community
2.  Create written and/or audio-video content based on local needs and applicable laws. 
3. Help volunteers and community members represent their issues in public hearings, etc. 
4. Compile modules for a peer group of district lawyers on the relevance of the Constitution in day-to-day practice

1. A monthly stipend and expenses for the cases taken up during the fellowship (on meeting deliverable deadlines)
2. Fellows will receive content writing, media training and any other skill development training that the Nyaaya team identifies as necessary during the orientation. 
3. Fellows will have access to Nyaaya’a and Vidhi’s catalog of books and e-subscriptions to various journals and publications to aid them in their work.
4. Fellows will have access to Nyaaya’s network of lawyers, grassroots organisations, CSOs, and media persons, all driven by the mission of making the law and entitlements accessible to those at the grassroots.

The Fellowship will help make law an instrument of social change, strengthen the public interest law community, and make justice mechanisms accessible. It will close the last-mile gap in accessing justice by assisting underserved communities in navigating the justice delivery system.

Further, the fellowship will help create change at the grassroots level by encouraging more people to approach and engage with justice and governance structures, be active citizens and hold state mechanisms accountable.

Take a look at the impact created by the first cohort of Samvidhaan Fellows – Samvidhaan Fellowship Impact Video