In this week’s faculty seminar, Dr. Anindita Adhikari, Assistant Professor, Social Science, will be presenting her paper titled ‘Disputing the State: Redeeming rights though state-backed claim-making in India’ on December 24, 2025.

Abstract

There is considerable consensus amongst socio-legal scholars that for social rights to be realised the law must be pursued beyond courts, through local institutions and that local structures of claim-making, beyond litigation, are needed. However, accounts of how national rights regimes are embedded in and supported by local structures and actors and how the expanded institutional terrain of the state triggers rights claims, is not as well understood. This article focusses on a novel reform in India, called social audits, which are a set of legally backed forums and procedures that induce welfare-based claims and complaints. This article argues that these forums for claim-making have expanded the downward reach of the state and by taking on the costs of social rights mobilisation, have invited an unprecedented increase in formal claim-making. The article identifies the logics of state-backed claim making to explain how social rights can be claimed even in contexts with extreme social exclusion and patrimonial bureaucratic cultures. It provides valuable insights into the infrastructural support needed not just for vernacularising the law but to transform the vernacular of claim-making itself.