[Vidhispeaks] Litigation: Last career option for women?

Deepika Kinhal

Former Team Lead, JALDI

Deepika Kinhal was the Team Lead of JALDI. Since 2017, she authored several data-driven research reports seeking to understand the systemic issues that plague India’s justice delivery systems. She has been a part of expert committees constituted by the eCommittee of the Supreme Court of India and NITI Aayog to improve justice delivery through technology, and has led engagements with multiple High Courts to study and improve their case and court management systems. She also appeared before the Parliamentary Standing Committees on Mediation Bill and Judicial Impact Assessment. At JALDI, she was focused on translating our research findings into tangible solutions and enabling evidence-based reforms in the judiciary. In this, she collaborated with experts from various domains and worked with similar minded organizations across the board. Her dream as an Indian citizen and a judicial reforms enthusiast is to have a modern, responsive judiciary that delivers quality, effective justice in a manner that befits the aspirational 21st century Indian. She graduated from NLSIU, Bengaluru in 2012. Before joining Vidhi, she practiced as a civil-commercial lawyer in Karnataka with Dua Associates, and as a real-estate and capital markets lawyer at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas.

Atishya Kumar

Former Research Fellow

Atishya Kumar was a research fellow at JALDI. At JALDI, she worked on the Lest We Forget Project, which resulted in a report on the performance of District Courts across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic; Re-imagined Civil Rules of Practice (process re-engineering); and a team engagement that she was a part of was with the National Court Management Systems’ Human Resource Sub-committee. She also frequently works on short pieces relating to gender diversity within the judicial system. She graduated with a B.A. LL.B (Hons.) from National University of Advanced Legal Studies, Kochi in 2018 and an LLM in Human Rights Law from University of Nottingham in 2019, for which she was awarded the Developing Solutions Masters Scholarship. She has previously worked as a research consultant for government bodies-the National Human Rights Commission and Department of Justice, Ministry of Law and Justice. She has also been a Director at Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access (IDIA), a non-profit organisation, prior to joining JALDI. Her dream is for the Indian judiciary to be more inclusive in the years to come. As one of the core pillars of democracy, representation of the people that the judiciary seeks to serve is essential at all levels. To achieve this, the judiciary needs to make systemic changes that strike at the root cause of gender discrimination within the system.

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