Centre of Legal Research v. State of Kerala (1986)

The other legal aid decisions in this module are about a lawyer for an accused. This one is about the design of a legal aid programme, and it is the case that explains why the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 does far more than pay for representation. Read the list of functions the Act gives its authorities — legal literacy, legal aid camps, encouragement of public interest litigation, Lok Adalats, work with voluntary organisations — and you are reading this judgment in statutory form.

It is also the source of the sentence that answers the commonest short question on the philosophy of legal aid: the poor are participants in the programme, not its beneficiaries.

The proceedings concerned the running of a legal aid programme in the State and the place within it of voluntary organisations and social action groups. The Court's answer is given as a description of what a legal aid programme must contain, rather than as relief between parties, and that description is what the course relies on.

Two propositions.

1. Legal aid is an entitlement, not charity. The people in need of legal assistance are to be treated as participants in the legal aid programme, not as mere beneficiaries; and voluntary organisations and social action groups must be encouraged and supported by the State in running it.
2. Litigation alone is not enough. A legal aid programme must be strategic. The Court described such a programme as including the promotion of legal literacy, the organisation of legal aid camps, the encouragement of public interest litigation, and Lok Adalats, also called niti melas, for settling disputes whether pending in court or not.

1. Ask what the poor litigant's problem really is. It is not only that he cannot pay a lawyer. It is that he does not know he has a right, cannot reach the place where rights are asserted, and cannot sustain a long contested proceeding. Paying for counsel answers one of those three.
2. Treat the recipient as an agent. If the programme is run for the poor rather than with them, it reproduces the dependence it was meant to remove; hence participation rather than benefaction, and hence the role of voluntary organisations and social action groups who work among the intended users.
3. Match the mechanism to the problem. Legal literacy answers ignorance; camps answer distance; public interest litigation answers the case of the group that cannot litigate for itself; Lok Adalats answer cost and delay, including for disputes not yet in court.
4. Give the State a supporting role rather than a monopoly. The State's duty is to encourage and support the organisations doing the work, which is what makes the programme reach places State machinery does not.

It opens the question on the philosophy or scope of legal aid, and it is the authority to cite when explaining why the 1987 Act's authorities are given functions far beyond funding representation. Note especially s. 7(2)(c), which makes preventive and strategic legal aid a duty of the State Authority: that clause is the statutory home of this case's idea, and a favourite point to miss. The same idea explains the legal literacy and camp functions of the District Authority and Taluk Committees, and the place given to voluntary organisations.

It disposes of the view that legal aid means free counsel and nothing more, and the view that the recipient of legal aid is a passive object of State bounty.

It does not decide the structure of the later Act, the income criteria for entitlement, or anything about Lok Adalat procedure: those come from ss. 12, 13 and 19 to 22 of the statute. Cite this case for the programme's philosophy and content, and the Act for its machinery.