“You may never know what results come of your actions, but if you do nothing, there will be no results.”

– Mahatma Gandhi

Introduction

Archana is from Samastipur, Bihar. 1 The 19-year-old college student’s routine is slightly different from most other youngsters of her age. “There is a lot of unemployment in Samastipur and people there are in desperate need of the benefits of the MNREGA (The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005)”, Archana says. The plight of the wage workers around her stays on top of her mind as she goes through her day. A volunteer with the Jawahar Jyoti Baal Vikas Kendra in Samastipur, Archana is a regular lis- tener of Mobile Vaani, a community media platform. Started by Gram Vaani (a participatory media platform), Mobile Vaani (a voice-based social network for rural India) is Archana’s window to the world of problems that people in her region face. One pressing issue is that of application for work under the MNREGA. The programmes and discussions on Mobile Vaani first helped her understand the problems workers face in filling out the forms needed to obtain job cards and/or register their demand for work. This moved Archana to act on this issue, instead of just being a listener. Using the forwarding features built into the Mobile Vaani platform, she shared the grievances with MNREGA offi- cials such as the rozgar sewak and the block programme officer. Her persistence made the Rozgar Sewak commit to holding a Rozgar Diwas at the Panchayat Bhava every Wednesday, in order to help people register under the employ- ment scheme. This is over and above the mandate for a Rozgar Diwas once a month. Just promises, however, are not enough for Archana, who tweaked her daily routine to ensure that the officials kept their word. Her work is far from over as she continues to look out for people in Samastipur. “ Haan, col- lege se time nikalna padta hai par satisfaction bhi bahut hai (Yes, I have to take time out of college [for all this work], but it brings me immense satisfaction)”, she says.

Ajitesh, 2 a law graduate who recently turned 21, spent the better part of the summer of 2019 distributing pamphlets in Kolkata, Patna and Ranchi. The purpose was to encourage the use of mediation in resolving legal disputes. “Again and again, I had to clarify – mediation, not meditation”, he recounts. Ajitesh was a part of the Indian Mediation Week, an annual mediation aware- ness campaign organised by SAMA, a leading online dispute redressal (ODR) platform. In 2019, upon entering his second year of college, Ajitesh decided to work as a case manager at SAMA, actively supporting and often co-mediating with those seeking to settle disputes on the platform. “I knew what I wanted to do”, he says. His good work made him the lead of the Maharashtra Online Lok Adalat enabled by SAMA. The Lok Adalat handled 18,000 disputes, with the total settlement value crossing INR14 crore in just 17 days. Ajitesh and his team of fellow law students and technologists listened to stakeholders and added platform features to solve problems on the go. “It was very demanding but also very rewarding”, he says.

Poonam Yadav, 3 a resident of Akolikala village in Chhattisgarh, described herself as a “regular housewife” before she started working for Haqdarshak, an organisation that makes access to Government Welfare Schemes easy by enabling last-mile access through agents as a part of their work. Despite being educated, she felt she did not do anything constructive for herself and her family. It was the desire “to do something” that propelled her to undertake the Haqdarshak training. Post that, she would go house to house raising awareness on government schemes, registering households for government entitlements and processing their documentation for enrolment. In 2015, there were no Sukanya accounts, a Government-backed saving scheme for the girl child, in her village. Poonam was the first one from Akolikala to get such an account. Today, there are more than 400 Sukanya accounts in the village. When Poonam started out, she was hesitant, unsure if people would even listen to her. Today people from across the village invite her home for an understanding of the benefits they are entitled to. Before she joined Haqdarshak, she was merely a resident of the house in her father-in- law’s name, but today, in her own words, “no matter where you go, anyone will guide you to Poonam’s house”.

Archana, Ajitesh and Poonam are the faces of a new tribe of actors making justice possible in India. With creativity, fresh energy and enterprise, these young ‘justice makers’ are bringing something new to problem-solving for justice. From being patient seekers of justice, they are transforming into smart and thoughtful leaders who understand the needs of people, mobilise communities and work with local authorities and processes to deliver justice.

‘Justicemakers’ can be told apart from enthusiasts or even activists by the fol- lowing features:

Thousands of ‘justicemakers’, often young, are emerging all over the country. With or without a law degree, they are taking on justice issues that others have given up on. In 2021, over 870 young case managers participated in bringing the Lok Adalats online, thereby resolving 1,56,962 cases in the year amount- ing to over INR 9.38 crore. In Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand, young women community leaders are working with lawyers and the Association for Advocacy and Legal Initiatives (AALI) to identify local cases of gender violence and abuse and support legal interventions. In Mollem, Goa, young people of the state rallied under the banner of the Save Mollem campaign, in order to design the best legal strategies to protect local forests; and in Shivpuri, Madhya Pradesh, law students are working with community leaders from villages inhabited by tribes to use the best legal tools to solve issues pertaining to environment and livelihoods. As Ajitesh puts it, “ Baithe rehne se kya milega (What can you get by just sitting around)?”

Platform power

Behind Archana, Ajitesh and Poonam are platforms such as Mobile Vaani 4 , SAMA 5 and Haqdarshak 6 that are helping people realise their full potential as ‘justicemakers’. The real revolution is in the jugalbandi (fusion/orchestration) of ‘justice makers’ and these enabling platforms.

Platforms are technology-powered environments that give people the option to organise differently. 7 People separated by time, place and language are able to connect in various ways and create value for each other. 8 Over time, platforms can gather a huge amount of data on their activities and interventions; this data can fuel a virtuous cycle of insight and innovation. 9 The genius of platforms lies in overcoming the transactional asymmetry of society, i.e., the inability to find someone who is willing to fulfil your needs.

The age of platforms

We are all familiar with the power of platforms in the for-profit space. Uber and Ola have generated income opportunities for drivers whilst fulfilling the com- muting needs of a large number of people; Zomato and Swiggy have created opportunities for thousands of shops and restaurants to access a wider pool of consumers whilst leveraging a vast network of delivery agents. They help people answer each other’s needs by organising smartly, thanks to technology. Whether it is transport, food, logistics, health or anything else, platforms have the power to unlock an entire world of solutions. 10 There has been much criticism directed at these platforms as well because they tend to maximise their own profits at the cost of every other part of the system - buyers, sellers and delivery people. 11,12 The platforms argue they should be allowed to claim a significant percentage of rev- enues because they are providing opportunities at a scale where few exist. Given the huge class-linked power imbalance in our country, this argument stands on shaky ground.

Platforms for social change

Platforms for social change are a different animal altogether. They do not just offer a blueprint for harnessing platform power for social change; they also offer guid- ance for all platforms to realise their true potential in facilitating the well-being of people. 13

The community radio platform Mobile Vaani , which enables Archana in Samastipur to do what she likes doing, was set up in 2009. 14 With an intention to build a bottom-up, voice-based social media network platform for rural India, founder Aaditeshwar Seth wanted to empower people in small towns and villages to share their concerns and experiences with their community. 15 The focus on voice-via-mobile was a game-changer, letting hundreds and thousands of lis- teners find their voice. Rather than sharing individual complaints via a discrete helpline or literacy-requiring systems like the post, people air their grievances via voice messages, catalysing other community members, civil society organisations (CSOs) and even government officials to step in and take action. 16 The Gram Vaani media and governance team also trains volunteers such as Archana to raise awareness and to work with the departments concerned to resolve issues. For instance, building on the success of the Samastipur, Gram Vaani volunteers deliv- ered letters to the representatives of nearly 300 panchayats, urging them to orga- nise a Rozgar Diwas on a regular basis, publicise the same amongst communities and ensure that anybody who needs work finds work. 17 Through collaborations with legal literacy-oriented organisations such as Nyaaya, legal needs that arise through the Mobile Vaani platform are picked up by other volunteers who can help resolve them. 18 Relevant grievance-related information is also shared with government officials, increasing their accountability and responsibility. 19 Of the 60,000-plus complaints it received, Mobile Vaani volunteers successfully resolved more than 40 per cent of the issues related to individual schemes and entitlements and community grievances.

SAMA is a young organisation in its very DNA. Its founders and case man- agers, i.e., people who ensure that a case is taken through the right resolution processes, are in their early twenties. The case managers and dispute resolution professionals, i.e., mediators, conciliators and arbitrators who actually address the cases, are called ‘resolutionaries’. That is because SAMA sees its work as steward- ing a movement towards collaborative resolution of disputes outside courts. Like commercial platforms such as Uber or Swiggy, they are also ‘matching’ disputes to case managers and dispute resolution professionals. The SAMA platform has grown tremendously in the last few years. Since 2020, SAMA has partnered with both state and private players to onboard over 1.2 crore disputes of which more than 25 lakh have already been resolved by 2022. Some time back. SAMA collab- orated with the Maharashtra State Legal Services to handle motor vehicle challan cases. SAMA has 3,000+ case managers and mediators in 443 cities, fluent in over 31 languages. 20

Aniket Doegar started Haqdarshak with a passion for creating impact at scale. An ex-Acumen and Teach for India fellow, Deogar and his team are building systems to enable welfare delivery service at the last mile at scale. On the one hand, they train women such as Poonam in communities ( haqdarshaks ) to use the Haqdarshak platform to enable service delivery. On the other, the team also collaborates with foundations, governments and other agencies to ensure last-mile delivery. Until 2022, they have trained more than 23,000 haqdarshaks, impacted over 31,000 micro businesses and unlocked benefits worth nearly H 4,000 crore. 21

Mobile Vaani, SAMA and Haqdarshak are platforms for social change. These platforms distinguish themselves from ordinary commercial platforms in

Another commonality that platforms for social good have is their recognition of the digital divide and their use of appropriate offline infrastructure along with an online architecture. For instance, SAMA enables young law students to be case managers, a crucial offline role that connects the digital infrastructure with the stakeholders in the ODR ecosystem. While the “mandate” of the case man- agers is to be a bridge between the digital infrastructure and the stakeholders, many of them often go out of their way. For instance, Ankita Rawat, a student of the Himachal Pradesh National Law University, was a case manager on the pilot collaboration between Madhya Pradesh State Legal Services Authority and SAMA to address cognisable criminal offences through ODR. As the pilot required police officers to file their cases online, she travelled 50 km in a car with her parents and checked in on eight to 10 police stations a day to ask if they needed help. Her ability to empathise with police officers and clarify their questions directly led to more confidence and trust in the system and more cases filed online. 38

At the core, these platforms for social change are designed around the goal of empowering all their participants to create exponential change. The focus on unlocking agency for every user is in stark contrast to maximising profit by squeezing a user with less power than the other. This “societal thinking” approach empowers citizens to solve problems and tip society towards exponen- tial change. 39 Societal Platforms is working with leading non-profit Ashoka to empower social entrepreneurs to incorporate this thinking in their work. The result of this could be the creation of platforms that marry the rich insights of decades of grassroots work with the power of platforms to connect people and resources at scale. 40

Solving for Population-Scale Access to Justice

Access to justice in India is a hydra-headed challenge that is unlikely to be solved with a single service, however remarkable. One billion Indians fall within the ambit of free legal aid and only a tiny fraction avail of it owing to a lack of aware- ness, trust or ease of use. 41 These one billion speak 19,500 dialects and encounter a wide range of issues such as property, entitlements, employment and family. 42 Many issues are intersectional and cannot be looked at as legal issues in isolation.

The millions of justice problems in their unique contexts require tens of thou- sands of justice solutions. 43 Often it is only local ‘justice makers’ such as Archana, Ajitesh and Poonam who understand the needs of people, mobilise communities, work with local authorities and processes, deal with imperfect information, create awareness, find solutions and take action. Abhay Jain of Zenith recounts an exam- ple from Shivpur, MP, where, despite several efforts, the government officials did not undertake safety measures for sewage workers (or implement the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act 2013). 44 Tired of government inaction, Jain and his team carried bags of sewer waste, placed them at the Collector’s table and threatened to open the bag if nothing was done. Within a week of this incident, most workers were provided with safety equip- ment and manual scavenging had ceased. 45

These ‘justice makers’ are the foundational building blocks that we need to make justice for all a reality. It is imperative for us to invest in their leadership and make locally accessible resources available to them, in order to unlock their fullest potential. Platforms for social good enable this by creating efficiencies of time, space and location, and providing space and encouragement to transform young people into ‘justice makers’.

Language has historically been a big barrier to the reach and effectiveness of platforms for social good. Every 50-100 km, dialects in India change and most people are voice-users more than text-users. Language codes for trust and when people are not able to share their concerns accurately or even understand the nuances of any support offered to them, they are inadequately empowered. This is a challenge but innovations in this area are flying thick and fast. Bhashini is a project of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeITY), which aims at enabling people to access content and resources in their own language. 46 Building off a massive data set of speech in Indian languages, Bhashini is leveraging cutting-edge artificial intelligence to transcend the language barrier and allow localisation in a country like India. 47 The Bhashini portal has software that allows for voice-to-voice translation between most Indian languages. 48 Soon, any Indian platform for social good can onboard and process a query in a local language and then provide a local solution in the same language without the need for expensive translation or cumbersome workflows.

Platform-age investors are even challenging the concept of the ‘platform’ itself in order to birth a new model that delivers network benefits of a platform without downsides such as centralising control, capturing excess data and creating depen- dencies. The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), an initiative of the Central government and supported by a wide range of private collaborators, is the most notable among these. 49 Using protocols that enable buyer apps, seller apps, delivery and settlement apps to connect with each other and some critical enabling components such as a reputation ledger to increase trust and ease of use, ONDC is creating an interoperable, decentralised network ecosystem to make e-commerce possible without platforms. 50 Systems like this could connect a wide range of public and private legal services—legal advice tools, dispute resolutions, digital court apps, signing and notarisation apps and more—to create a vibrant ecosystem that can work for every Indian.

The Role of Government

The Government of India has historically seen itself as India’s largest service provider. Over time, we are seeing the government pay as much attention to unlocking ecosystems. Parts of the government have already seen a role for them- selves in unleashing the power of networks and platforms. As mentioned earlier, Bhashini and ONDC are examples of this thinking where the government plays the role of creating critical public goods and innovation ecosystems to unlock more government and private innovation.

In the Digital Courts roadmap published by the e-Committee of the Supreme Court, the stated intent is to create a ‘platform’ that not just powers the courts in an adaptive and scalable way but also a host of attendant services that even private actors can provide. Each one of the five features of Phase III is about enabling the network through a platform-based approach as summarised in Figure 1. 51

As this ecosystem thinking translates to every part of the government to solve large-scale ‘wicked’ problems, there is scope in the justice space also for the gov- ernment to evolve from being a service provider to an ecosystem enabler.

The Department of Justice’s Nyaya Bandhu programme, which connects indi- viduals with pro bono lawyers, 53 can partner with CSOs and community justice networks. This can help legal professionals create a more holistic and robust response than a straightforward direct connection that may lack the requisite trust and support structure. Nyaya Bandhu can also collaborate with CSOs and com- munity justice networks towards a shared commitment to develop the capacity of community paralegals.

The Telelaw program by the Department of Justice, which allows marginalised people to connect with panel lawyers at the pre-litigation stage, 54 can become a national mission that drives access and innovation. A sandbox model can be piloted by inviting organisations to extend Telelaw across the country. The broader community around Telelaw can also develop other tools such as local language chatbots that extend access where needed. Both Nyaya Bandhu and Telelaw can become ‘platforms for social good’ that work with multiple actors by providing technology access, human resources as well as potentially financial resources to truly extend access to justice.

Conclusion

These new ways of distributed problem-solving—platform-thinking, net- work-thinking and ecosystem-thinking—make it possible for us to solve the complex problems associated with access to justice at scale. They are ‘how’ we can unlock the agency and creativity of millions of Indians who are unable to express themselves without access and empowerment. They go well beyond mere ‘automation’ and ‘digitisation’ to connecting problems with solutions in an infinitely varied way. Access to devices, local capacity building and local language translation can put these solutions in the hands of citizens. They can shift the experience of the citizen from being stymied by the law to being empowered by it. This ‘new power’ can also counterbalance the other forces that thrive in the status quo. A resource-constrained litigant is often at the mercy of lawyers, the system and even the other party. The matter is then no longer really about law but an inadequate solution for the problem. When this resource-constrained litigant has more information, a local guide and easier access to expertise, justice is much more likely to be the outcome - as seen in the examples cited above.

The fear that platforms will become the new oppressors can be mitigated by the different characteristics of platforms for social good and the evolving form of the open network where no one platform controls or concentrates power. Justice innovators have shown themselves far more ready to create new models, open resources and collaborate. For instance, the Working People’s Charter (WPC) net- work is a coalition of organisations that work on issues related to informal labour in particular and labour in general. WPC along with Aajeevika Bureau set up the India Labourline in September 2021 to provide legal aid and mediation services to workers, specifically migrant workers. 55 Any migrant worker can reach the helpline and be immediately connected to the resource to aid them. In less than a year, the Labour line reached 25,000 workers, registered 2,342 cases, resolved 788 of those and recovered over H 1 crore in wages for migrant workers. 56

Behind all these innovations and initiatives are human beings. When we act from mindsets of scarcity—a frequent condition of legacy actors—the result is incremental innovation. But where we develop the capacity to see and do differ- ently, the result is leaps of imagination. In order to nurture more such powerful justice innovators and the resultant new generation of networks and platforms, we need to invest in developing capacity and community. The capacity of innovators to integrate their inner worlds and outer realities to drive disruptive yet sustain- able change, and a community of change-minded people that can discover, sup- port and enable ideas. Between 2019 and 2021, over 50 innovators participated in Agamishaala, an initiative by Agami (an organisation that enables ideas and entrepreneurs in law and justice) to do just this kind of capacity and community building. 57

Avanti Durrani of Artha Global, a public policy research, consulting, and net- work facilitating organisation says, “We’ve, you know, just carried this colonial legacy on for the last 70-80 years; we never rethought how the policing structure should look like for a society like ours. We just have one model to police us all. And then there is this preconception of what justice should be within this construct. But you need to reimagine it. And I think we are still carving out our role in that.” 58

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