Sachin Malhan*, Varun Hemachandran** & Smita Gupta***
Today, there’s an AI app in every pocket.
At a justice innovation workshop in a rural Tamil Nadu law school—well past the temple town of Mahabalipuram—we asked a class of law students how many were using ChatGPT. Every hand shot up. In an urban college, this wouldn’t have been surprising. But here? Their professor explained: most of these students were the children of farmers and fishermen from adjoining villages.
Technology has never moved this fast. From cutting-edge labs to the pockets of citizens, AI isn’t trickling down—we’re in the AI Big Bang.
Every day, a new startup emerges promising to revolutionise top-tier law firms and legal practices. From AI-driven legal research to smarter case management, the focus is often on making elite lawyers more efficient. Some, like Sarvam AI, backed by a $41 million purse, are pushing the boundaries of legal tech.
But while these innovations supercharge law firm workflows, this article looks elsewhere—at the ideas transforming justice for the masses. Through this piece, we take a closer look at how technology is bridging the gap between our systems of justice and the people who need them the most.
The Last Mile Problem
Mohammed Abdullah Khan and his father are commercial farmers in a Mewat village, growing jowar, millet, mustard, and sesame. Like much of Mewat, their village exists in an information void—low literacy rates and limited access to newspapers keep them disconnected. But Jio’s mobile internet revolution has changed that, bringing affordable data and connectivity.
For farmers like Abdullah Khan, government schemes are lifelines—covering everything from subsidies on farm equipment to crop insurance, micro-irrigation, and access to credit. India’s central and state governments run over 10,000+ schemes, many poorly documented. Until recently, there was no single repository for them. Spotting the gap, organisations like Haqdarshak stepped in nearly a decade ago, simplifying access and registration for those who need these benefits the most. Of late, government portals like MyScheme have tried to bridge the information gap, but complex and unintuitive interfaces make them hard for the average farmer to use. The result? Limited impact.
Recognising this challenge, the OpenNyAI mission—led by Agami in partnership with EkStep, AI4Bharat, Thoughtworks, and Microsoft Research—launched Jugalbandi in 2022. This open-source Digital Public Good acts as a smart bridge, linking everyday chat apps like WhatsApp to authoritative sources of information.
Jugalbandi doesn’t just provide information—it enables action. Farmers were able to interact with an AI assistant built on top of Jugalbandi’s stack, in their own language, using text or voice, to enquire and register for schemes and services effortlessly. It’s a simple but powerful way to cut through bureaucratic complexity and make government benefits truly accessible.
India’s linguistic diversity—22 official languages and thousands of dialects—makes access to information a major challenge. Most laws, regulations, and government documents are in English, a language understood by only about 10% of the population.
AI’s real impact in India won’t just be in translation. Its true power lies in simplifying, synthesising, and tailoring information to match the user’s cognitive abilities. As AI evolves, it has the potential to break language and literacy barriers, making crucial government information accessible to those who need it most.
A Lawyer In Every Truck
For India’s truck drivers, the road isn’t just about long hours and tight deadlines—it’s a legal minefield. Random police checks, expired permits, and the ever-present risk of search and seizure make every journey unpredictable. Accidents add another layer of stress. When a truck loaded with goods meets with an accident, the driver’s first worry isn’t their own safety—it’s the cargo. The fear of police seizures, theft, and legal troubles often forces them and their employers to shell out large sums just to keep moving. The cost of these legal entanglements? A staggering $35 billion a year for the logistics industry.
The pandemic made things worse. With trucks being the only vehicles allowed on the roads, harassment at state borders and checkpoints skyrocketed. That’s when Lawyered, a legal tech company with a network of 55,000 verified lawyers, started noticing a spike in calls from truckers. But the problem wasn’t just about getting legal help—it was about getting it at the right time.
Truckers don’t need a lawyer after the fact—they need one in the moment. How do you put a lawyer inside every truck?
Gurgaon-based Lawyered, in partnership with the All India Transporters Welfare Association (AITWA), first set up a 9-to-5 legal helpline. It quickly became clear that truckers needed help at night, not just during business hours. The service evolved into a 24/7 legal helpline, offering real-time legal assistance to any truck driver, anytime.
They took it a step further—mapping out legal support along the highways. Under their BharatMala Project, Lawyered empaneled a lawyer for every 50 km of India’s national highways, ensuring that if a case needed physical presence, help would arrive within two hours.
When a trucker calls, a lawyer speaks directly with the police or authorities, cutting through red tape. In 89% of cases, that’s enough to resolve the issue immediately. For the rest, a local lawyer closest to the scene is dispatched.
The model works because it taps into existing networks. By partnering with apex transport bodies like AITWA, Lawyered reaches truck owners at scale. Companies can subscribe based on fleet size, ensuring every truck on the road has legal backing at all times. Today, Lawyered covers over 4 lakh trucks across the country.
For truckers, the value is simple: no more bribes, no more unnecessary fines, no more fear of losing their cargo. No matter the time of day, they have a lawyer on their side—on demand, on the road.
Lawyered isn’t just solving legal issues—it’s working to prevent them. With vast data on truck routes and legal hotspots, it launched LAILA, an AI assistant available to truckers 24/7.
LAILA isn’t just another chatbot. It analyses route history, flags high-risk checkpoints, and helps drivers navigate the safest, most legally sound path. By steering truckers away from trouble before it happens, the system reduces stress, cuts down on police harassment, and minimises the legal load on Lawyered’s team. The result? Over ₹50 crore saved in fines—and fewer roadblocks for India’s truckers.
Dear Prime Minister
For most Indians, the government is an opaque giant. When a public service fails, where do you even file a complaint?
Back in 2007, the Indian government recognised the chaos—over 160 grievance platforms spread across departments, some tied to specific schemes, others to broad issues. To streamline this, it launched CPGRAMS (Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System)—a single platform meant to handle everything from local complaints to letters to the Prime Minister.
But centralisation didn’t mean simplification. With 90+ departments, 18,000+ grievance categories, and over 1 lakh Grievance Redressal Officers (GROs), routing errors were inevitable. Every month, 2 lakh grievances flood the system, many landing in the wrong place, left unresolved. The burden of figuring out the right department fell on the citizen who was expected to navigate a series of endless dropdown lists on a clunky interface.
In 2024, OpenNyAI partnered with the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances to rethink the process. The team—Thoughtworks, Agami, and Microsoft Research—introduced an AI-driven grievance bot based on Jugalbandi that takes the guesswork out of filing.
The big insight? Most people don’t articulate their grievances fully. So, the bot dynamically generates follow-up questions, ensuring complaints are properly detailed before submission. Using past data, it then identifies the right department, category, and GRO, reducing misrouting and increasing the chances of resolution.
Grievance data is more than just complaints—it reflects deeper systemic issues. To tap into its full potential, the government is rethinking CPGRAMS, not just as a portal for filing grievances but as a framework for managing them efficiently through a system of standards and protocols.
The next phase, Next-Gen CPGRAMS, is being developed as an open-source Digital Public Good to set standards and protocols for grievance redressal. AI will play a key role in improving how grievances are filed, ensuring they reach the right department, and helping officials prioritise cases. Language translation features will make the system more accessible, while AI-generated dashboards will surface trends that indicate areas for policy intervention and process improvement. By structuring and analysing grievance data better, the government aims to move beyond just addressing complaints to identifying and fixing underlying problems.
Keeping People At The Centre
AI in law, particularly in India isn’t just about automation or efficiency—it’s about bridging systemic gaps that have long kept justice out of reach. Arming truckdrivers with legal information to negotiate with the police, farmers trying to claim entitlements, or citizens navigating government grievance systems—each of these interactions reflect deep system challenges. Legal processes in India have been designed for those who understand the system rather than those who need it.
The ideas covered in this article—whether AI-powered grievance filing, real-time legal assistance, or multilingual legal access—are important not because they make things faster, but because they shift who the system actually serves. The introduction of AI to bridge our systems of justice is not just an infusion of technology; it’s a fundamental shift in power. It reduces reliance on middlemen, cuts through bureaucratic ambiguity, and forces institutions to be more responsive.
While mainstream AI conversations are dominated by model sizes and capabilities and which model made it to flavour of the week, the real groundswell is happening elsewhere—in the hands of justice innovators. The legal system doesn’t just need better tech; it needs more entrepreneurs leveraging open-source AI to make justice work for people who need it most.
The real opportunity isn’t just in building ever-larger and smarter models but also in rethinking access and applying existing AI capabilities creatively and responsibly. A strong movement of innovators can push the system from reactive to proactive, designing tools that bridge the gap between citizens and the law—making legal access not just possible, but seamless.
*Sachin Malhan, a graduate of National Law School of India University, is Co-founder of Agami and a seasoned entrepreneur and changemaker with a track record of driving social innovation. Before founding Agami, he led the Changemakers program at Ashoka, leveraging a global network to accelerate high-impact social initiatives.
** Varun Hemachandran leads the OpenNyAI mission at Agami, where he explores how artificial intelligence and frontier technologies can dramatically scale access to justice for over 1.4 billion Indians.
*** Smita Gupta is a Delhi-based lawyer and legal technologist. She co-leads the OpenNyAI or 'Open AI for Justice' initiative focused on leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance access to justice. She was recently part of the India delegation to the QUAD Critical and Emerging Technologies Forum in Japan.
About Agami & OpenNyAI
At the heart of Agami’s work is the curation of justice changemakers (justicemakers). By fostering trust, nurturing shared purpose, and facilitating impactful connections between people and ideas, Agami creates the openness essential to advancing justice.
The OpenNyAI mission acknowledges the transformative potential of AI in catalysing Access to Justice. It explores how technology, and AI in particular, can unlock fresh energy, innovative ideas, and new pathways to justice—redefining roles and expanding possibilities in this critical space.
Agami is a Sec 8. not-for-profit organisation trying to catalyse the field of law and justice. The OpenNyAI mission is a collaborative led by Agami and consisting of Thoughtworks, EkStep, Microsoft Research, AI4Bharath, and others.
For more information, visit agami.in and opennyai.org
Comments