I am a sixteen-year old student from Mumbai, India.

Three years ago, I chose 'Juvenile Justice' as the subject of my research for a communication project Then, as a 13-year old, I was drawn to a cause that I had never really heard discussed before as I tried to understand what I would have felt to be a child stuck in an overcrowded, rather abusive system that seemed intent on punishment without hope for change. For me, the project sparked a continued interest in questioning what opportunities for reform truly looked like in India.

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While the intention of the judicial department stands firm in securing justice for every Indian, what I’ve encountered is that the country is home to a vastly overburdened system which seems to offer neither just punishment nor meaningful rehabilitation. Instead, prisons are overfilled with individuals who have not yet been proven guilty, many trapped in prolonged legal casework due to the overwhelming backlog in the courts.

 

In conversations with families of incarcerated individuals, I learned how months of detention often meant the loss of a family’s primary earner, even as their cases remained painfully stagnant. This was frequently compounded by a lack of legal awareness and limited access to reliable legal aid. This brought the realisation for the need to raise awareness on the plight of prisoners in India and to educate Indians on our right to justice. ​

 

Thus, Project Insaf came to life with the motivation of delivering justice for the 3.9 lakh undertrial detainees as well as the thousands of convicts and ex-convicts in India who deserve to be treated with justice.