CPR Land Rights Initiative (LRI) is pleased to invite you to a Panel Discussion at the India Land and Development Conference, 2020 on
Accessing Justice: Deciphering Land Decisions through Data Analytics
Presentation of Research
Dr. Namita Wahi, Fellow, CPR & Director, LRI
Mr. Kaustuv DeBiswas,Visiting Fellow, CPR LRI
Discussants
Dr. Aparna Chandra, Assistant Professor and Director, Centre for Constitutional Law, Policy and Governance, NLU Delhi
Mr. Alok Prasanna Kumar, Senior Resident Fellow and Team Lead, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, Karnataka
Mr. Devendra Damle, Research Fellow, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
Twenty five percent of all cases decided by the Supreme Court involve land disputes, of which thirty percent concern disputes relating to land acquisition. Various empirical legal studies of Supreme Court and High Court cases show that land disputes clog all levels of courts in India, accounting for the largest set of cases in terms of absolute numbers and judicial pendency. The average pendency of a land acquisition dispute, from its creation to its resolution by the Supreme Court, is 20 years, which compares unfavourably with other sets of pending cases before the Court. In 2017, LRI launched its Report on “Land Acquisition in India: A Review of Supreme Court cases from 1950 to 2016“, which was the most comprehensive qualitative and quantitative study of land acquisition disputes decided by the Supreme Court between the period 1950 to 2016, numbering 1269 cases. This Report, recently cited in the Supreme Court, analyses land acquisition disputes along various metrics, such as public purpose, procedure for acquisition, compensation, modes of access to the Supreme Court, and pendency of claims; and tracks trends with respect to distribution of disputes across geography and time. In a hitherto unprecedented effort, LRI is conducting a pilot study to devise an algorithm that can successfully capture data from this study created manually by a team of researchers, and replicate all or part of the work.
In this panel discussion, Namita Wahi and Kaustuv DeBiswas will present preliminary findings from the pilot study. This will be followed by comments from Aparna Chandra, Alok Prasanna Kumar and Devendra Damle.
