With an aim to make legal aid easily accessible to the marginalized communities and citizens living in rural areas, the government on 11th June 2017 has launched the Tele Law initiative.
For this, the Ministry of Law and Justice partnered with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in an initiative that anchors the Digital India programme, to provide legal aid services through its Common Service Centres (CSC) at the panchayat level, spread across the country.
According to the Law Ministry, in the first phase, the ‘Tele-Law’ scheme will be tested as a pilot across 500 such CSCs in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to understand the challenges and make necessary corrections to the scheme before it is scaled up and rolled out across the country in a phased manner.
Under the scheme, a portal called ‘Tele-Law’ will be launched, which will be available across the CSC network.
This will connect the citizens to legal service providers with the help of technology-enabled platforms.
‘Tele-Law’ will enable people to seek legal advice from lawyers through video conferencing available at the CSC.
Additionally, law school clinics, District Legal Service Authorities, voluntary service providers and Non-Government Organisations working on legal aid and empowerment can also be connected through the CSCs anywhere and anytime, in order to strengthen access to justice for the marginalized communities.
A robust monitoring and evaluation system is also being designed which will help in assessing the quality of legal advice provided and the ensuing benefit to those accessing it.
