The National Legal Services Authority (NALSA)’s recent decision to discontinue the Legal Aid Defence Counsel (LADC) Scheme, established primarily to provide legal aid to prisoners, is sudden and puzzling.
From September 2026 onwards, contracts of LADCs in Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh will not be renewed. The stated reason is that LADCs threaten the livelihoods of young lawyers in these states. Elsewhere too, LADCs have been told that their contracts will not be renewed.
The concern about the economic condition of young advocates is real, given the poor remuneration that early-stage litigating lawyers receive. However, to pin the blame for their economic plight on LADCs is unfair. LADCs represent accused persons in the criminal justice system, principally undertrials who cannot access private lawyers. How can that narrow sliver of legal practice, for a section that cannot pay for legal representation, plausibly be treated as a threat to the livelihood of the young lawyers?
The effectiveness of a legal aid scheme must be judged by how it serves its intended beneficiaries and not by the metric of providing sufficient work opportunities for lawyers. The beneficiaries here are poor prisoners, who are often unaware of what they are accused of, too poor to arrange a lawyer and, more importantly, isolated from the outside world by prison walls. Their liberty should not become a bargaining chip in a debate over professional opportunities for young lawyers.
NALSA introduced the LADC Scheme in 2022, recognising the shortcomings of the older DLSA panel lawyer system in representing prisoners. Under that model, cases are distributed to empanelled lawyers, who can continue private practice while taking up legal aid cases. Panel lawyers are expected to take up cases for a large population including women, children, victims of trafficking, transgender persons, industrial workmen, prisoners and people below prescribed income limits. They are often paid on a case-to-case basis through an honorarium.
The LADC Scheme noted that panel lawyers may not be able to devote time to legal-aid matters for prisoners, especially for consultations with clients. There are instances of beneficiaries being harassed or asked to pay fees for this free service. These factors made a case for a new imagination of legal aid for the criminal justice system, especially for undertrial prisoners.
Nothing in the recent debate suggests that the problems identified by the LADC Scheme have disappeared. A study by Anup Surendranath and Gale Andrew found that between 2016 and 2019, only 7.91 per cent of undertrials admitted to prisons availed the legal aid services to which they were entitled. The researchers identified poor utilisation and lack of confidence in legal aid as serious concerns.
Data from recent years do not offer any hope for improvement for the panel lawyer model. The India Justice Report 2025 documents a 17 per cent decrease in empanelled lawyers between 2022 and 2024. While the establishment of LADCs may partially explain this decrease, there were only 3,585 lawyers at LADCs in 2024-25.
This is not an argument against panel lawyers. Although empanelled lawyers provide committed and essential service under challenging circumstances for meagre remuneration, the existing panel lawyer system is inadequate to meet the needs of legal representation in India. India’s legal aid system under NALSA is expected to serve a large population across varying types of disputes and axes of vulnerabilities. The number of panel lawyers for this population has remained inadequate, creating a large unmet need for legal representation. The system is also hamstrung by weak monitoring, inadequate supervision or mentoring, low or delayed honoraria and a payment structure that does not prioritise sustained representation.
The Scheme was designed as a response to these problems, focused on prisoners. It was modelled on full-time public defender systems in other jurisdictions. LADC lawyers are prohibited from private practice during their contractual term. There is an established hierarchy of chief, deputy and assistant LADCs. Such a structure assures steady income, supports supervision and mentoring and creates the institutional capacity to offer quality legal aid.
The LADC Scheme is relatively new, having been rolled out in different states at different time periods since 2023. Now, the LADC scheme is being scrapped without offering this model enough time for an evaluation.
A few preliminary insights can be gauged from NALSA’s reports and the LADC’s statistical dashboard. In 2022, NALSA reported having 44,472 panel lawyers. In the same year, panel lawyers attended 1,58,607 remand cases and filed 45,304 bail cases, that is, 3.57 remand cases and 1.01 bail applications per panel lawyer. LADC’s dashboard indicates that in the first quarter of 2025 alone, 3,830 LADCs handled 14.5 remand cases and 13.1 bail applications per lawyer.
NALSA’s annual reports also indicate that more prisoners are receiving legal representation following the rollout of the Scheme. In 2021, 2,20,216 prisoners were provided legal aid. By 2024-2025, this number had nearly doubled to 4,72,954.
Ultimately, legal aid schemes should not be treated as a discretionary freebie. Article 39A of the Constitution directs the State to provide legal aid by suitable legislation or schemes or in any other way. Any decision on the continuation of the LADC Scheme should be based on an objective evaluation of the scheme. Such an evaluation should focus on data-based assessment to conclude which model provides better legal representation and inspires greater confidence amongst prisoners. The success of a legal aid scheme is not measured by how many lawyers get cases. It is measured by how many undertrial prisoners are represented by legal aid lawyers who have the time, skill and institutional support to defend them effectively.
Leah Verghese is a Research Manager and Lakshmi Menon is a Research Associate at DAKSH Society, Bengaluru.