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Foundation for Legal Research and Training

New Delhi, India
Joined November 2018

Rights in Action

Presence in: India
Focus: Criminal Justice

Foundation for Legal Research and Training (FLRT) seeks to rectify the broken legal system by training and coaching youths from Dalit and Tribal communities to get into premier Law Schools in the country. Here at FLRT, we are driven by philosophy of Dr. B.R Ambedkar to make the world a better place free of oppression and discrimination.

Transfer of power from colonial masters to independent India and continued system of English common law offered a little window of opportunity to Indian judiciary to introspect and develop a system, compatible with existing social disparity and emerging economics, and politics. After independence, responding to the requirements of new nation, the system of legal education started churning legal minds to continue its legacy of leadership role in all fields of social life. For people connected to this dominating system, accumulated power through inherited social means and resources and fully exploited the system to gain access and control over power, government and politics. Also, the struggle after independence for them was not for survival, existence or upliftment but for excellence and dominance. This notion of excellence and dominance had intersectionality of superiority of caste and rich dividends of caste based society, which later got translated into notion of ‘merit and efficiency’ in legal jargons. This transformation of so called inherited legacies into meritocracy, riding on colonial language left no scope for oppressed masses to take up law as a tool to fight injustice. The path to access education, the ultimate gateway to temple of justice was systematically eroded. As a consequence of this the faith of the oppressed masses in the constitution once again have turned from certainty to one of ‘Hope and Dream’.