DISHA Pan India Legal Literacy and Legal Awareness Programme

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Access to Justice has been recognized as an essential facet of human development, for ensuring democratic governance, in reducing poverty and for the purpose of dispute resolution and prevention. India’s judicial and legal system has much strength: excellent constitutional and legal safeguards for access to justice; well-established institutions; independent judiciary, a vibrant voluntary sector and an independent media. The country has progressive laws in many areas such as the recognition of historical injustices, importance of group rights, affirmative actions for vulnerable sections, including for women and children. The governments’ priorities in legal and judicial reform include improving the efficiency of the justice delivery system for marginalized groups, who do not have strong lobbies to ensure that their rights are guaranteed.

To meet the aspirations of the Government, the DoJ has formulated a coherent scheme on Access to Justice titled as “Designing Innovative Solutions and Holistic Access to Justice (DISHA)” for the period of 2021-2026. The Scheme of DISHA aims to amalgamate and merge different Access to Justice components being executed by DoJ to bridge the gaps in justice delivery. It serves three key objectives that include providing quality legal aid through different mechanism of Tele-Law, Nyaya Bandhu - Pro Bono Legal Services and Nyaya Mitra programme to make people Legally Literate, bring positive changes in the mindsets and attitudes.

The Legal Literacy and Legal Awareness programmes through Pan India Action Plan envisages a multi-stakeholder, progressive and transformative approach that would integrate innovative ideas, tools and simplified methodology to enable vulnerable sections to key information and awareness on legal rights, entitlements and relevant laws. The belief is that improved Legal Awareness of people would pave the way for speedy and affordable justice delivery. To mainstream legal literacy through forging partnerships with local administration for training and sensitization of existing workforce, grassroots/frontline workers/volunteers on Legal Literacy and Legal Awareness issues. Trained and sensitised functionaries will be expected to initiate community level Legal Literacy and Legal Awareness Programmes. It also includes the implementation of micro-level and field level innovative Legal Literacy and Legal Awareness Programmes/campaigns.  The main agenda of implementing this programme is to enable the vulnerable sections of society to have access to information about their legal rights, entitlements and creating better legal awareness so as to make justice delivery system citizen-centric.

As an implementing agency under this programme, the Centre for Environmental Law, Education, Research and Advocacy (CEERA), National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru has been granted a Two-Year Project on “Digital Legal Literacy – Dissemination and Assessment”. The project focuses on dissemination of legal literacy and is to be implemented in aspiration districts across 6 States of India namely – Maharashtra, Odisha, Bihar, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka. The main objectives of the project include the following:

• Dissemination of the Legal Literacy on Mass level
• Creation of an overall communication strategy including digital/social media platforms
• Strategizing Effective and Sustainable legal awareness campaigns
• Conceptualizing and conducting workshops and legal aid competitions event coverage and launches related to the programme
• Conceptualizing and conducting Youth Connect Workshops by planning events in colleges/schools and institutions