Prisons, Courts and Legal Aid presents the learnings and reflections of the Programme from its work during January 2019 to March 2021. The analysis presented aims to demonstrate empirically verifiable trends which have emerged from the Programme and reflect on them to draw lessons for improving legal aid service delivery through the District Legal Services Authorities and Taluka Legal Services Committee (LSAs).
Our team’s experiences reflect that it is a labour and resource intensive initiative which is susceptible to the same slippages as state-sponsored legal aid without regular supervision and monitoring. This is a major learning towards proposing a systemic reform of legal aid. For a more robust and sustainable legal aid system, there should be dedicated lawyers working exclusively to provide legal aid to criminal defendants, similar to the recently implemented Legal Aid Defence Counsel System (LADC). The Programme’s learnings also make it imperative that the setup of the LADC office should not only have dedicated lawyers but also trained social workers who respond to the special needs of the clients, follow-up and be the bridge between the client and the system.
Access the Executive Summary here.
The Square Circle Clinic, NALSAR 