Project on Access to Justice for Marginalized People

The Department of Justice, Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of India is implementing a Project on ‘Access to Justice for Marginalized People’ with support from United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The Project, being implemented in 7 states (Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh), aims to strengthen access to justice for the marginalized - particularly women, scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and minorities - by supporting strategies and initiatives that seek to address the barriers they face. The Project focuses, on the one hand, on improving institutional capacities of key justice service providers to enable them to effectively serve the poor and disadvantaged and on the other hand, on directly empowering the poor and disadvantaged men and women to seek and demand justice services.

The Project, started in 2009, has completed two years of implementing activities. It is supporting organisations/institutions to implement certain innovative activities relating to legal awareness, legal aid, and strengthening the capacities of institutions/ CSOs, communities in the 7 Project States. Covering a variety of rights and entitlements ranging from rights against domestic violence and other women’s rights including their right to property and land, rights of SC and STs, land rights, forest rights, RTI, to rights under the criminal laws, the Project is using innovative strategies for legal awareness like creating paralegal workers, using community radio, SMS etc. Some other initiatives that have been initiated include creation of IEC material, preparation of a training module for judges, creation of a module for adult legal literacy, creating a database of primary justice institutions, a study of the law school based legal aid clinics etc.