NLS Alumna Vibha Nadig Featured in Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 | Class of 2025

Since its inception in 2019, ‘OutLawed India’ has formed a network of legal aid trainers across India, who offer what they call ‘last mile justice delivery.’ We spoke to Vibha and asked her to share more about her journey and work.

What are your thoughts about being featured in the Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 Class of 2025? 

It’s definitely exciting! I think when you’re in the impact space, you have to grapple with the complex feeling of “there is so much to be done and I wonder where this gets me,” or “will this help me grow the mission further?”. I’m incredibly excited and grateful to Forbes for this recognition, but this is one milestone in a very, very, very big mission.

Can you tell us about how OutLawed India started? Where did the idea spring from?

I started ‘OutLawed’ in 2019. It was my second year at NLS and after an especially bad exam, I remember thinking to myself that if I was struggling so much to understand the law while being at the best law school in the country, I could only imagine how inaccessible the law is to people who didn’t have access to formal legal education.

In general, I always had a passion for teaching. My grandparents were teachers. I spent a lot of time during my school years volunteering in government schools. I thought I could combine my newly acquired knowledge of the law with my passion for teaching.

I started recruiting volunteers from law schools across the country and we put them through a short training with the support of my friends at Teach For India. We would then go to places like government schools and anganwadis, and we would help raise awareness about the law — everything ranging from women’s rights to cyber laws and consumer laws.

At that point, my ‘theory of change,’ was that if you help people understand the letter of the law, it will help them access their rights and access justice. Very quickly we realised that this was not the case. We started to realise that people may know of the law; for example, if you are facing domestic violence, you could theoretically know that you need to go to the police station, but that knowledge doesn’t give you the courage to walk into a police station by yourself and get that FIR registered.

When I was in my fifth (and finaI) year at NLS, I had to take a call on whether to take the corporate route, the litigation route, or the policy route. Instead, I decided to go full-time with ‘OutLawed’ straight out of University. I was lucky enough to have people from NLS join me full time, which was a really big show of faith. This was going to be their first job as well as mine.

Just being from the NLS community is so helpful. Our first supporters and mentors were all NLS alumni. Their support really helped shape what ‘OutLawed’ is today. So, with that support we went into it full time.

What is the long-term vision for OutLawed? What do you hope to achieve in the years ahead?

Shortly after we went full time into ‘OutLawed’, we had the idea to start training members from underserved communities as paralegals, or as we call them, ‘Nyaaya Mitras.’ These individuals are trained in regional languages and they’re from the communities they serve. Our paralegals are migrants, domestic workers, factory workers, and belong to gender and sexual minorities. They are trained to provide the first point of contact for legal services. This could range from registering an FIR, or a DIR in a domestic violence case; securing an RTC (Record of Rights, Tenancy, and Crops) or khata (document that confirms the property’s legality and its status) from the sub-registrar’s office; to drafting a legal notice to your employer if they haven’t paid your wages on time.

What we hope our ‘Nyaaya Mitras’ will do is provide localised and contextual legal aid in regional languages by functioning as friendly neighbourhood paralegals. Essentially taking the law out of courts and into the homes of people who need it the most. Over the last six months, our Nyaaya Mitras have worked with over 2500 individuals; navigating complex issues from domestic violence and child sexual abuse to community level issues like water access and evictions.

We envision that one day our paralegals can be the equivalent of ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activists) workers in the law, who will work at that scale, at that engagement, at both the state and national level.

Is there a message you have for law students?

We need so many more initiatives to come out of law schools if we’re going to solve issues involving access to justice. However, students will need foundational support in order to do this, and I’m excited to pass on the baton to the next generation. I’m so hopeful at the kind of innovation that I know law students are capable of!

View the Forbes Asia List of 30 Under 30 2025 here.