About the Editors and Contributors

Editors

Shruti Vidyasagar is a lawyer and has pursued a diverse legal practice in Bengaluru for over 14 years. She is also a consulting editor at DAKSH. In addition, she works with leading academic presses, institutions, and universities, editing books and reports on law, society, development, and management. She has co-edited a volume of essays titled Leadership and Role Modelling: Understanding Workplace Dynamics, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.

Shruthi Naik is a lawyer and research associate at DAKSH. Her primary area of interest is legal system reform, with a focus on improving accessibility and efficiency of dispute resolution mechanisms and legal aid services.

Harish Narasappa is a lawyer and co-founder of DAKSH. He is also a founding partner of Samvād: Partners, and has practised in India and the United Kingdom for over 20 years. He is involved in many social interest litigations before the Karnataka High Court and the Supreme Court and is deeply interested in finding meaningful solutions to ensure speedy and fair justice delivery for all. His book, Rule of Law in India: A Quest for Reason, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018.

Contributors

Amulya Ashwathappa is a research associate at DAKSH. Her areas of interest are gender studies and constitutional law.

Gaurav Banerjee is a data analyst at DAKSH. He has experience working with statistical tools and machine learning algorithms.

Arpita Biswas is an academic researcher working towards a master’s degree in gender studies at the Central European University in Budapest. Her area of interest is gender justice.

John Richard Ebenezer is a lawyer based in Chennai and is a legal consultant for the International Justice Mission (IJM). He has 15 years of experience in rescuing and assisting victims of human trafficking and bonded labour, assisting the prosecution in the trial courts, and has appeared in the High Courts on behalf of victims.

Ajay Gupta is the Joint Secretary & OSD (IT) and is the project in-charge of LIMBS.

Poornima Hatti heads the dispute resolution practice at Samvād: Partners. She has extensive experience and specialises in corporate and commercial disputes, including construction and infrastructure disputes, shareholder disputes, and insolvency matters.

Arunav Kaul is a research associate at DAKSH. He conducts empirical legal research on the problem of delay in the Indian judicial system.

Alok Prasanna Kumar is a Senior Resident Fellow and heads the Bengaluru office of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. He practised as an advocate in Delhi between 2009 and 2013 and worked in areas of taxation law, constitutional law, and administrative law, among others. His areas of interest include the judiciary, constitutional law, and theory.

Tina Kuriakose is the associate director for government relations at IJM. She works to provide solutions based on IJM’s expertise and experience towards regulatory and punitive measures against bonded labour, addressing migrant workers’ vulnerabilities in inter-state cases, and strengthening rehabilitation measures for survivors of bonded labour and trafficking.

Malini Mallikarjun is a core team member and programme director of the Centre for Excellence-Legal in Piramal Education. She has over 22 years of experience working as a tax and regulatory consultant and is currently working on legal reforms with the Education Departments of the Governments of Jharkhand, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra.

Siddharth Mandrekar Rao is a research associate at DAKSH. His areas of interest include research on political economy and the judiciary.

Titiksha Mohanty is working towards an MPhil in law at the University of Oxford. Her areas of research interest include comparative constitutional law, human rights, and gender studies.

Neha Munjral is a dual-qualified lawyer (India and New York) working as the Senior Counsel for the GE Steam Power business in South Asia. She has over 10 years of experience working in both law firms and as in-house counsel, in various infrastructure sectors (power, education, roads, oil, and gas) as well as financial services.

S.S. Naganand is a senior advocate at the High Court of Karnataka and a qualified chartered accountant. He has over 38 years of experience in corporate and commercial laws, international trade law, taxation, intellectual property law, and arbitration. He also has an extensive pro bono practice.

Sharada Naganand is an advocate at JustLaw in Bengaluru. Her areas of practice include intellectual property law, constitutional law, commercial and corporate laws, and labour law.

Jayasankaran Nambiar A.K. is a sitting judge of the High Court of Kerala. Prior to this, he practised in Kochi, working primarily on constitutional law and taxation matters.

Sridhar Pabbisetty is the Chief Enabler at the Centre for Inclusive Governance, a citizens’ collective for initiating social action on public problems. He is a public policy and urban governance specialist. He has also served as the Chief Executive Officer of the Namma Bengaluru Foundation, in which capacity he filed numerous PILs for improving urban governance in Bengaluru.

Surya Prakash B.S. is the programme director at DAKSH. He is a chartered accountant and law graduate with more than 14 years of experience in handling tax functions of large global IT companies.

Vijay Raghavan works at the Centre for Criminology and Justice (CCJ), School of Social Work, TISS, and is currently a professor with the Centre. He also leads Prayas, a field action project of TISS that works on the protection of legal rights and social re-entry of criminal justice clients. His research interests include access to justice and prison reforms, anti-human trafficking, and rehabilitation of custodial populations.

Manaswini Rao is a doctoral candidate in Development Economics in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California at Berkeley. Her research is at the intersection of development and institutional economics, focusing on the importance of judicial institutions on economic development in India.

Aparna Ravi is a partner at Samvād: Partners. She has extensive experience in the field of insolvency law and was a member of the Bankruptcy Law Reform Committee constituted by the central government of India. She writes and delivers lectures regularly on insolvency law reform in India.

Shelly Saluja is a lawyer working as a Lead Commercial Counsel with GE Power, wherein she supports the Gas business for the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia Region. She has over nine years of experience in the field of litigation, regulatory, and commercial disputes.

Ritwika Sharma is a research associate at DAKSH. Her areas of interest include comparative constitutional law, administrative law, and legal theory.

Ruth Thomas is an advocate who works in Bangalore. She has over seven years of experience working on cases related to sex trafficking, rape, POCSO, labour trafficking, and bonded labour.