Past Campaigns

India Institute has always believed that generating new knowledge and ensuring it reaches the people who most need it are equally important goals. Our early campaigns – in legal literacy, citizens’ rights, and education advocacy – remain part of our institutional record.

Niti Express – Yeh Kahani Haq Ki Hai

Niti Express was a radio and video campaign using short, narrative-driven stories to help ordinary Indians understand and exercise their legal rights. Each episode as a nano tale based on a real situation – sexual harassment at work, arrest rights, the use of RTI, fighting dowry – and showed concretely how legal protections could be invoked. The campaign was produced in Hindi and reached a national audience in partnership with Radio City across 8 tier-II cities in north India.

Save Deepalaya School

In 2013–14, India Institute led a public campaign against the forcible closure of Deepalaya School – a low-cost private school serving low-income families in Delhi – under the Right to Education Act’s infrastructure norms. The campaign documented how RTE’s compliance requirements were destroying the very schools that served the children the Act was meant to protect, and brought the issue to national attention.

i-torney: Your Pocket Lawyer

i-torney was a mobile app designed to widen access to legal information for ordinary citizens – a people’s pocket lawyer that put plain-language guidance on citizens’ legal rights in the hands of anyone with a smartphone, covering employment, consumer protection, family law, and police conduct.

i-torney was discontinued as AI-assisted tools made it possible for anyone to access and navigate publicly available legal information directly. The underlying need – for ordinary people to understand and exercise their legal rights – remains central to India Institute’s work.