LocationsBy Isabelle Tschan and Sneha Pathak
Enhancing Access to Justice in India: Reaching the Last Mile
May 25, 2026
A daily wage worker in rural Maharashtra drops a legitimate case - not because he has lost faith in the courts, but because each hearing costs him a day's earnings he cannot spare. An Adivasi family, despite the protections of the Forest Rights Act, finds itself unable to meaningfully contest a land acquisition heard hundreds of kilometres away in a language they do not speak. A transgender woman trying to file a harassment complaint encounters a police record system that has no category for what happened to her.
India's commitment to justice is written clearly into law. Article 39A of the Constitution places equal justice at the heart of the State’s obligation, making clear that access to legal aid cannot depend on a person’s economic or social position.
Over recent years, the government has expanded a substantial legal-aid and justice delivery architecture, including NALSA and the State Legal Services Authorities, Lok Adalats that dispose of millions of cases annually, Fast Track Special Courts for sexual-offence cases, One Stop Centres for women facing violence, the Tele-Law programme delivering pre-litigation advice through Common Service Centres, the Nyaya Bandhu pro bono platform, and the ongoing expansion of e-Courts.
The framework is in place. The question now is one of last-mile reach: how to ensure that the people the system was designed to serve - particularly the most vulnerable like women, Adivasi and Scheduled Caste communities, and those at the intersection of multiple disadvantages - can actually use it. Closing that distance is where India's next gains in access to justice will be made.
The Awareness Gap
UNDP India's People-Centred Justice Needs Assessment, which surveyed 2,500 people from marginalised communities across six states, found that 80 percent of those who had not used legal aid had simply never heard of it. The most fundamental dimension of the justice gap, in other words, is not distrust - it is invisibility.
When disputes arise, most people in marginalised communities do not call a lawyer or visit a legal aid clinic. They turn to family, friends, community leaders, or local mechanisms such as the Nyaya Panchayat - the village council that resolves minor disputes. These structures are accessible, familiar, and embedded in everyday life in a way the formal system is not.
The Gender Dimension
The gender disparity in this picture is sharp. Among those who faced a dispute and took no action, 72 percent of women said they did not know what to do, compared with 46 percent of men. Among women from De-notified Tribe and Scheduled Tribe communities, more than half reported complete uncertainty about available pathways - over twice the rate of men in the same communities.
The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) found that nearly 30 percent of married women in India have experienced physical or sexual violence by their spouse. Of these, 87 percent never sought help of any kind. Among the few who did, only 7 per cent approached a formal institution.
These numbers point to something the legal framework alone cannot resolve: the social and informational distance between a right on paper and a remedy in practice. The question is not whether justice should work through community structures - millions of women already rely on them - but how to make those structures safer and more responsive, and how to connect them more reliably to the formal system.
A New Frontier: Climate and Justice
These pressures are intensifying as disputes linked to environmental loss, displacement, and climate shocks multiply. Eighty percent of respondents to the UNDP assessment reported environmental or natural-resource disputes within their communities. For Adivasi and other tribal communities — already contending with geographic isolation and limited legal literacy — climate-related displacement does not arrive as an isolated event. It compounds vulnerabilities that are already present, and it is unfolding faster than most legal aid providers have been trained to respond.
This is an emerging area where India has the chance to lead. The National Green Tribunal, established in 2010, places India among the first countries in the world to create a dedicated environmental court. Few jurisdictions have yet built legal aid systems equipped for climate-driven disputes. Strengthening this capacity early would allow India not only help to close a critical access to justice gap, but also to shape a model that other countries are only beginning to consider.
What Global Experience Shows
Justice pathways for marginalised communities work best when they move through existing relationships rather than around them. This is the premise of UNDP's people-centred approach: that formal systems are only one avenue of redress, and rarely the one available to those who need it most.
The UNDP–UN Women Gender Justice Platform, active in 45 countries, has built its work on this principle. In Tanzania, the Platform partnered with the Ministry of Constitutional and Legal Affairs to reach more than 56,000 people through legal aid and awareness campaigns covering land, inheritance, and gender-based violence - strengthening paralegals and community workers as local champions while supporting judicial officers in gender-responsive adjudication. In the Philippines, it has bridged formal courts with community mechanisms, recognising that sustainable change for survivors of gender-based violence requires meeting women where trust already exists. In Sri Lanka, the Know Your Neethi ("Know Your Laws") campaign brought legal services directly to women navigating poverty, stigma, and isolation.
The thread running through these examples is consistent: gender justice demands more than legal reform. It requires sustained attention to the social, cultural, and institutional terrain that determines whether reform reaches the people it was written for.
What Already Works in India
India does not need to import its solutions. They are already present - in the paralegal who speaks the local language, in the Nari Adalat that has earned a woman's trust, in the ASHA worker already at her door, in the civil society organisation that knows how to move a case from silence to action.
Tele-Law has demonstrated complementary potential: by delivering pre-litigation advice through Common Service Centres, it has extended legal counsel into rural and tribal areas at a scale unimaginable a decade ago. Lok Adalats continue to resolve enormous case volumes that would otherwise sit in formal courts for years.
In Gujarat, the Working Group for Women and Land Ownership, an NGO network has spent more than two decades placing community paralegals in 17 districts, helping women from lower-caste and tribal communities navigate land records, contest revenue officials, and assert inheritance rights. A 2021 World Bank Discussion Note on land access in India documented that between 2013 and 2019, WGWLO helped 8,818 women from lower-caste and tribal communities secure land titles through its community paralegal model operating across 17 districts of Gujarat. NALSA's national paralegal volunteer network operates on the same principle, and women paralegals have proven especially effective in cases of gender-based violence, where shared lived experience builds the trust that institutions rarely command.
The architecture is real and growing. The opportunity is to deepen it - particularly at the community interface.
Where Investment Could Go Furthest
The paralegal volunteer network serves as the first line of legal support for many Indians, yet this architecture is under growing strain. According to the India Justice Report 2025,, a legal aid clinic that served 42 villages in 2017 now reaches 163. The paralegal volunteer network has shrunk by 38 percent over the same period.
A second priority is equipping legal aid providers to handle environmental and climate-related disputes, an area where capacity has not yet caught up with demand.
A third is the connective tissue between community actors and formal institutions: Civil society organisations with decades of experience helping people move from a problem to a remedy. They are, in practice, the front door of the formal system for millions of people, and resourcing them as such is among the most cost-effective investments in justice delivery available.
A practical place to begin is one that already exists: strengthening the paralegal volunteer network, ensuring consistent compensation, and expanding its training to cover environmental and climate disputes. Building on trusted relationships at the ground level is how India can extend justice to women and the most vulnerable — and unlock it as a powerful enabler of inclusive development.
Isabelle Tschan is the Deputy Resident Representative, UNDP India and Sneha Pathak is the Gender Analyst, UNDP India
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