State legal aid and undertrials: are there no takers?

ABSTRACT While the crisis in India’s legal aid system is well documented, the extent of utilization of legal aid lawyers for representation in court has received little attention. In this article, based on existing public data, we seek to demonstrate the extent of underutilization of legal aid services among prisoners nationally. The data reveals that over a period of 4 years, between 2016 and 2019, only 7.91% of the undertrials admitted into prisons utilized the legal aid services they were entitled to. This phenomenon of underutilization raises uncomfortable questions about the performance of India’s legal aid system, particularly in the context of socio-economic vulnerability of prisoners. However, the limitations of the data mean that it is not possible to determine the reasons for such underutilization – whether underutilization is being driven by lack of awareness of legal aid or by socio-economically vulnerable undertrial prisoners choosing other options despite being aware of free legal aid.