“ACCESS TO JUSTICE IN INDIA: A SOCIO‑LEGAL STUDY OF HOW LAW, SOCIETY AND INSTITUTIONS SHAPE THE RIGHT TO FAIR AND EFFECTIVE JUSTICE”

Access to justice is widely recognised as a foundational requirement for the legitimacy of any legal system, because rights on paper are meaningless if people cannot effectively enforce them. In India, this idea is embedded in the Preamble’s promise of justice—social, economic and political—and operationalised through constitutional provisions, statutory schemes and judicial decisions that seek to remove economic and social barriers to courts and legal remedies. Yet, despite this strong normative framework, a significant gap persists between formal guarantees and lived realities, particularly for poor, marginalised and rural communities who continue to experience the legal system as distant, expensive and intimidating. This paper uses a socio‑legal approach to examine how law, society and institutions actually shape the right to fair and effective justice in India, moving beyond doctrinal analysis to include social structures, power relations, and everyday experiences of litigants. The study aims to connect constitutional ideals with empirical realities, highlighting how caste, class, gender, geography and institutional design together determine who gets justice, how quickly, and at what cost.