Bare-bones legal aid group helping rural poor in central India

Max Bearak reports for the New York Times under the headline, "Shoestring Legal Aid Group Helps Poor in Rural India."  The story features 44-year-old Shalini Gera, who lives in Jagdalpur, India, and runs a shoestring legal aid organization serving the rural poor:  

Ms. Gera likes to joke that, until recently, the closest she got to rural life was in San Jose, Calif. But here in Jagdalpur, in the central state of Chhattisgarh, she has become intimately familiar with the rhythms of a deeply troubled countryside — and the legal travails of the region’s indigenous people, known as adivasis.

Five years ago, she was a consultant in the Bay Area pharmaceutical industry, and a homesick member of the large Indian diaspora there. But on trips back to India, she became more and more passionate about social justice. Sudha Bharadwaj, a firebrand trade unionist and lawyer working mostly with laborers in steel plants and mines, urged her to look at Chhattisgarh, where human rights abuses are often overlooked in the clamor of a long-running conflict.

“What we really need here, more than anything else, are good lawyers,” Ms. Bharadwaj told her at the time.

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In 2010, Ms. Gera enrolled in Delhi University’s law program. There, she met Isha Khandelwal, 24, who also had redirected her trajectory from studying computer programming to studying human rights law in the capital. Together, and with the help of Ms. Bharadwaj, they founded a private legal aid group, operating on a shoestring budget comprising scholarships, donations, and personal savings.

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In July 2013, Ms. Gera and Ms. Khandelwal, together with another recent graduate, Parijata Bharadwaj, 25, who is no relation to Sudha, moved to Jagdalpur and founded the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group, leaving behind fretful friends and families in cities far removed from the conflict. A year and a half later, the three are now four — joined by Guneet Kaur, 24, a recent law degree graduate from the University of California at Berkeley. The team of young lawyers is now known by a nickname reminiscent of a made-for-TV drama: JagLAG.

They live together, sharing spartan quarters in the office-cum-apartment. Mealtime conversations revolve around the dozens of cases they are juggling. There are no weekends, and trips home are few and far between.

Ms. Gera goes almost every week to the district court in a nearby town called Dantewada. On a recent morning, in an empty hallway of the court, she took a black sports coat out of her backpack, unfolded it, put it on, and affixed a white advocate’s collar around her neck. In a country where court complexes are ordinarily filled with commotion, this one was a scene of relative serenity. Barely a handful of people milled about. Lawyers and judges sat on plastic chairs in the courtyard, sipping tea in the winter sun.