Access to Justice in India Isn’t a Courtroom Problem. It’s an Information Problem.
If you ask most people what is holding them back from justice, they will probably name the villains that are in plain sight: packed courts, years of waiting to hear their cases, lawyer who is too expensive and all that is right but the quieter barrier which exists in the headlines and which must be overcome in many parts of India is the lack of understanding on the part of the ordinary people or the right place to find a trustworthy lawyer. And, for this, the legal system doesn’t offer them any help.
Take, for instance, the Bar Council of India - the sole regulatory body for the practice of the legal profession- did a nationwide verification campaign to eliminate fake advocates in 2012. A decade later, but the BCI still hasn’t made the tally. Even the Supreme Court of India has observed that the BCI lacks effective powers to control the state bar councils. If the regulator himself cannot clearly identify the real lawyers, what can an ordinary person expect?
The One-Time Client Problem
In most cases, people go to a lawyer once or even twice during their whole lifespan, maybe for a dispute over a property, a divorce, or filing a complaint with the police. David Wilkins, a legal scholar, calls this a “one-shot litigant” scenario: Unlike a firm, which is a client of a law firm regularly and so gets to know how to evaluate them, the first-time user is not the wiser, can neither foresee nor assess the quality before or after the services have been rendered.
Such situations do not just appear in imaginary discussions. When a field investigation was done for a paper on India’s legal services market released in 2021, many of the respondents, i.e. clients, claimed that they had found a lawyer through their family members instead of relying on credentials, reviews, or public records.[1] Family networks act as the only working signal in a market where the performance is unseen, which in the end means the people who do not have the requisite connections do not get proper legal help.
A Market Where Lawyers Can’t Even Say What They Do
This is the real point: not only do the clients search poorly, but the lawyers are not allowed to even hint at the things they can do. The BCI code forbids advocates from advertising their services, promoting the use of their expertise, or advertising specialisations even on their notice boards.[1] Economists say that honest advertising lowers search costs and pushes prices towards fair value.[2] The legal profession has again deliberately closed that door, so informal, typically caste-based and kinship-based networks have remained the main channels of referral.
Legal aid is the safety net meant to protect the very people who are shut out of these networks. Article 39A of the Constitution states that everyone shall have the right to free of cost legal aid, but India spends less than even a per person on free legal aid every year.[1] And, in recent budget proposals, funding has actually gone down, not up, for the National Legal Services Authority. A right that is present only on paper becomes a fantasy for real-world people the moment they try using it, often because they never even heard of its existence.
What Would Actually Fix This
The solution is not just adding more lawyers or creating more courts. What’s the problem then exactly? Well, it comes down to the absence of a workable trust signal. Advertising ban relaxation with a regulatory setup, for instance, a setup where lawyers can show their fees, experience, and specialities within bounds that are real and, because of this, honest review and transparency which can be verified, will be the case of allowing information not just relatives - to be the deciding factor of who is employed. A few legal-tech platforms are already attempting this fill, but without any legal guarantee of the regulation for their operation in this manner, these are really not only limited fixes but ones of little scope at the best of times.
Conclusion
The issue of access to justice is often seen as a matter of infrastructure, getting more judges and more courtrooms, making hearings faster. These things definitely matter. Yet, for someone who is stepping into a legal environment for the very first time, with no clue who will be able to offer assistance and where they should begin, the first obstacle they run into is not a door of a court. It’s silence. Until silence is replaced with truthful guidance, justice will continue being an aspirational idea rather than a realised goal for individuals and society.
[1] Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, Hope Behind Bars? Status Report on Legal Aid for Persons in Custody (2018).
[1] Bar Council of India Rules, ch. II, pt. VI, § 36 (Standards of Professional Conduct and Etiquette), promulgated under Advocates Act, No. 25 of 1961, § 49(1)(c) (India).
[2] Albert Hudec & Michael Trebilcock, Lawyer Advertising and the Supply of Information in the Market for Legal Services, 20 U. W. Ont. L. Rev. 53 (1982).
[1] Varsha Aithala & Karthik Suresh, Knocking on Closed Doors: India's Challenges in Accessing Legal Services, Nat'l L. Sch. India Univ. (Jan. 17, 2022).