Legal aid is not a courtesy that is extended to the poor, it is rather a specific, measurable commitment that India has made. Article 39A of the constitution of India aims to promote justice on the basis of equal opportunity, to ensure that there is free legal aid to the economically weaker sections of the society. The Legal Services Authorities Act was passed in 1987, to give effect to the said aims of the constitution which asks the state to ensure that no citizen is denied justice owing to their economic vulnerability. The objective of the act clearly states:An Act to constitute legal services authorities to provide free and competent legal services to the weaker sections of the society to ensure that opportunities for securing justice are not denied to any citizen by reason of economic or other disabilities.This is also an international commitment that is being asked of the countries under Sustainable Development Goals. Sustainable Development Goal 16 asks to:Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.Therein, the target 16.3 specifically says:Promote the rule of law at the national and international levels and ensure equal access to justice for all.The framework for delivery of legal servicesThe National Legal Services Authority (NLSA) was constituted in November 1995, under the act. This was drafted keeping in mind the lived realities of people who end up on the wrong side of the system without representation because of the vulnerability posed by their identities that often exist at the intersection of poverty, caste, and religion, that long decides who gets noticed, and heard in the system. The vision on paper was far ahead of the workforce on ground needed to deliver it. Legal aid meant a list of empanelled lawyers who took cases as and when they had the time to, rather than a dedicated section for the vulnerable and defenceless. These gaps were addressed slowly, and gradually. In 2009, NALSA introduced the Para-Legal Volunteers Scheme, which entailed training people from villages, slums and labour colonies to bridge the gap between the system and the people who need it. This was the first real attempt to take the legal aid outside of the courtroom, in the grassroots.Then in 2010, the NALSA (Free and Competent Legal Services) Regulations added the next building block: the “front office”, which was a physical room in every legal services institution, to ground the idea of legal aid. It gave the district authorities a lawyer who engaged on a continuous basis rather than one assigned afresh from an empanelled list for each case; however, this lawyer also maintained a private practice outside work.And in 2011, the NALSA Legal Services Clinic Regulations, it went a step further and pushed legal aid out of court complex and into villages, jails, and schools, on the explicit model resembling a primary health centre; a first point of contact, staffed by para-legal volunteers, rather than a formal courtroom.However, all of these initiatives remain limited in scope. They do not address the need for legal aid services to be a distinct department with full fledged infrastructure and human resources rather than an annexure to the judiciary. In 2022, when NALSA rolled out the Legal Aid Defence Counsel System (LADC) after a pilot across 13 states was what can be considered the beginning of a stable response system. It set up proper offices in each district, a chief legal aid defence counsel, deputy and assistant counsel, dedicated support staff, case-management infrastructure, and a mandate that the lawyers here will only do legal aid and no private practice. Within only a few months, this was extended to 365 districts across 22 states, and it is the first such structure in India’s history that is built to resemble a full-time public defender’s office. This was a welcome step but limited in scope. Section 12 of the Act enlists who all are entitled to this help, and the list shows a fairly descriptive map of vulnerability rather than a general welfare gesture. It covers members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes; victims of trafficking or forced labour; women and children; persons with disabilities; victims of mass disaster, ethnic violence, caste atrocity, flood, drought or industrial accident; industrial workmen; anyone in custody, including in a protective home, juvenile home or psychiatric facility; and anyone below a prescribed income threshold. This requires a comprehensive system that can address the legal service requirement of all these categories of beneficiaries. Limitation of the LADC schemeThe LADC scheme focuses only on the undertrial prisoners, and this ignores the deep connection between limited implementation of various NALSA schemes, impoverishment and criminality. There are numerous factors that compound to make a person vulnerable well before any offence is alleged against them, caste, religion, income, occupation, the neighbourhood one lives in. That vulnerability also renders criminalisation easier. There is a vicious cycle wherein a person is in vulnerable positions due to many factors and then is criminalised, and then is unable to defend herself because on account of poverty, and the absence of a defence makes conviction, or simply prolonged custody. An example of this can be failure of the designated authorities to register eligible beneficiaries under the poverty alleviation schemes that are covered by NALSA (Effective Implementation of Poverty Alleviation Schemes, 2015) could render a person unable to afford a transport, and they could be charged for loitering on an apprehension, this is not the person’s personal failure rather it originates from the administrative default. Each of this deepens the next, and marginalised identities are easier to profile, not because they commit more crimes, rather, because the machinery of suspicion, arrest and remand has always moved faster against people who are poor, and poverty in India is still distributed along the lines of caste and religion, which was sought to be encompassed within section 12.While the LADC scheme came with its promises, it had its own shortcomings. Its mandate was drawn too narrowly. The imagination of a system that focused only on undertrials and excluded the other categories mentioned in Section 12, led to underutilisation in smaller districts with less number of cases. The infrastructure created by NALSA then remains underutilised. Meanwhile, several other beneficiaries are serviced by the panel lawyer system, the retainer lawyer scheme (National Legal Services Authority Free and Competent Legal Services Regulations, 2010) and the Department of Justice’s DISHA programme. What can be the way forwardThe decision to withdraw the LADC scheme under pressure from the ones with vested interests is unfortunate. NALSA’s own dashboard recorded a total of 4,86,354 cases assigned to LADCs in the 2025-26 against roughly 2.96 crore criminal cases that were instituted that year nationally. The LADC’s share comes to about 1.6%. To say that a cadre handling roughly one in sixty cases across the country is the reason young lawyers in district courts are short of work, then does not seem plausible. In response to the quashing of this scheme, a petition has been filed in the supreme court. It is pertinent to note that a committee consisting of J. P. Sam Koshy and J. A.K. Jayasankaran Nambiar was constituted by NALSA on March 6, 2026, to submit its report on revisiting the LADCs scheme and policy, and we are still awaiting its report. However, the question that needs pertinent attention is: if the scheme is actually withdrawn, what happens to the infrastructure that has already been built around it? As shown below, each LADC office comes with a significant amount of human resources, and infrastructure that has already been established in across 662 districts as of 30th June 2025. Discontinuation of the scheme would render this already in place infrastructure unused, it would leave a fully staffed and equipped office standing idle, with no clear answer as to whether it may be repurposed, may be absorbed into the DLSA’s existing machinery, or simply left to lapse. This is the main question that in our opinion needs to be asked, rather than reverting the legal aid work to an assigned-counsel model that NALSA’s own regulations in 2010 flagged for missed hearings and delayed filings, the LADC office could be widened into a single point where panel lawyers, retainer lawyers, and DISHA’s tele-law and legal awareness functions converge. Utilising the same infrastructure to be used towards a more holistic response mechanism that has dedicated full time staff and also acts as a point of convergence for various other schemes can be a strategy to ensure the momentum initiated by the LADC scheme is not lost. Rather than defending the LADC scheme, the idea is to draw a bigger line by reimagining the space. Nishita Sharma is a recent graduate from NALSAR university of law, and is currently working as legal researcher with Centre for Social Justice. Nupur also works with Centre for Social Justice.