Rural experience: Fewer legal aid clinics, police personnel

The pandemic left the already overburdened justice system overwhelmed and as a result the most vulnerable among us are in serious peril

As we approach the anniversary of the first Covid-19 lockdown and subsequent migrant crisis it unleashed, it is an opportune time to reflect how rural India — home to almost 400 million migrants and their families — remains under served in all essential pillars of justice delivery: police, prisons, legal aid and judiciary. While some aspects of the crisis such as the availability of food, health services and education received wide coverage, other equally significant ones, like access to justice services, were not. The India Justice Report 2020 offers a glimpse of the wide chasm between urban and rural India that compounded the crisis of migrants who returned to their home states in the aftermath of the lockdown.

Many migrants found themselves out of a job, and many of who were forced to return to their villages, left behind unpaid wages. Despite the government’s nudge to employers to pay all workers, we found out that most of 12,000 migrants whose travel to their home states we arranged during the lockdown were not paid their legitimate wages.

If the legal aid system had been functional in rural areas it would have certainly been part of their mandate to reach out to the employers who owed the wages thus providing much needed succour to migrants.

A unit of legal aid infrastructure in villages is a legal services clinic. Typically, a legal services clinic is required to cater to a reasonable cluster of villages, according to guidelines issued by the National Legal Aid Services Authority (NALSA). These clinics are expected to provide basic legal services and are meant to be the first points of contact for persons seeking legal advice and assistance, helping them to fill up forms to avail government schemes, and to draft representations, among other things.

According to IJR, before India entered the lockdown — in March 2020 — there were only 14,159 legal aid clinics for 597,617 villages or on average, one clinic for every 42 villages. Barring Rajasthan and Gujarat, other large states that saw reverse-migration such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh have nearly 100 or above villages served by a single legal services clinic.

Uttar Pradesh has the worst ratio at 520 villages for every clinic, while Rajasthan is at 7 villages per clinic.

Bodies such as the District Legal Services Authority which are meant to oversee the legal needs of taluka and block level units in the state were able to come to the assistance of migrants according to NALSA — their district level units with the help of local bodies such as ours, and many others across the country, coordinated the food, transportation, and shelter of 5.7 million people between April and June 2020.

It also needs to be noted that only 19,300 people were provided legal representation at the stage of being produced before the court across all the 669 DLSAs in the country, which indicates that their core function was impeded during the pandemic.

The good news is that states’ legal aid expenditure (what it gets from the Centre via NALSA and its own expenditure) has increased.

As the latest IJR report shows, in the last two years, 14 of 18 large and mid-sized states and five of seven small states have increased their contribution to their legal aid spend. Jharkhand, for instance, increased its share from zero to 59% between 2017-18 and 2019-20. Uttar Pradesh increased its share of expenditure from 20% to 89% in the same duration. West Bengal too showed a steep rise: from 18% to 59%.

Among the small states, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Tripura showed a steep rise in their share of expenditure towards legal aid. This has reflected in rural coverage of legal services, the IJR shows. In the past two years, 22 states and union territories have improved their average coverage of legal services clinics in villages. This has a direct impact on vulnerable sections such as women, children, Dalits and tribal persons.

At the moment, while the National Crime Records provides crime data in select cities, it doesn’t share crime figures disaggregated by rural and urban areas. We know from our experience on the ground that crimes, especially those committed against the vulnerable often go unreported, or are not even recorded by local authorities. The sparse availability of institutions like police stations only worsens the situation.

As per the IJR, in almost all states, rural police stations cover larger areas than their urban counterparts. In Rajasthan, for instance, the area coverage of a rural police station was nearly 35 times its urban counterpart (695 sq km to 20 sq km). Similarly, in UP, the area served by rural police stations is roughly 16 times that of an urban police station (235 sq km to 16 sq km). One rural police station in West Bengal, covers a population of 250,000 persons, as against the 140,000 persons covered by an urban police station.

Urban areas provide better access to state-run helplines for women and child victims of violence. In rural areas, the lack of access of women and children to even mobile phones means that many crimes cannot even be reported to the right authorities. An enhanced presence of legal aid services and police posts would ensure that victims are able to file complaints and seek help and protection.

A justice system that was overburdened in normal times has been left overwhelmed by the pandemic, and as a result the most vulnerable among us are in serious peril.

This holds especially true for rural areas. The pandemic seems to be on the wane, but now is the time to heed its lessons and improve the availability of justice services across the large swathes of rural India.

Faith in rule of law by the common man, after all, is at the core of democracy.

Gagan Sethi and Nupur (who only goes by one name) are co-founders of Centre for Social Justice, one of the organisations involved in bringing out the India Justice Report 2020. Released by Tata Trusts, IJR examines the state of justice delivery across prisons, judiciary, legal aid and police. The views expressed are personal.

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