Access to Justice Index®

This is an initiative to introspect into the accessibility and availability of adjudicatory mechanisms to the citizens of various countries. Providing justice to the aggrieved is a very basic right. However, many ground realities intervene as barriers to access of justice-poverty, illiteracy, physical inaccessibility, bureaucratic indifference, to name a few. It is to remedy these inequities that it becomes necessary to quantify the extent to which a citizen can access mechanisms for administering justice.

This study measures the availability of institutional mechanism for adjudication, their ease of access as well as their efficacy. The perception and receptivity of the people towards judicial and extra-judicial mechanisms has been considered significant as well. Legal aid is the bulwark of the modern state, so this too has been emphasized in this study. Quality and availability of legal aid are the main criteria. The role played in this process by lawyers and legal education faculty, not to mention law students, has been highlighted. State officers, inter alia, police, judicial officers, bureaucratic officers and their interaction with the people is an important component of facilitating access to justice.

We aim to provide a comprehensive, in-depth and measurable account of what access to justice is, what its components are and what barriers prevent it from being achieved, et al. We seek to find what rights actually exist for the common man in a society supposedly teeming with laws. We hope to provide some insights into how to bridge the divide between a law on paper and law in practice, in our quest to ensure justice for everyone.