News Type: Event

NLS Faculty Seminar | Colonial Legacies, Institutions, and Conservation: Forest Rights among the Gonds and Korkus in Madhya Pradesh, India

This week’s faculty seminar features presentation by Dr. Shiuli Vanaja, Assistant Professor, Social Science, NLSIU on ‘Colonial Legacies, Institutions, and Conservation: Forest Rights among the Gonds and Korkus in Madhya Pradesh, India.’ The paper has been co-authored by Deep Jyoti Francis, Science Policy Expert and Independent Researcher.

Abstract

India’s tribal (indigenous) communities have lived in and cared for its forests for generations. For them, forests are not just resources; they are home, livelihood, culture, and faith. Yet, these very communities are often displaced and labelled as threats to conservation because of formal institutional structure consisting of laws and policies rooted in colonial model of fortress conservation.

Within these communities, there also exists an informal institutional structure consisting of social norms and customary cultural practices that govern the interaction of tribals with forests.

Using qualitative data collected from 23 villages in Narmadapuram (old name Hoshangabad) and Betul districts of Madhya Pradesh, the authors study the relationship between forests and two tribal groups of this region, Gonds and Korkus. They explore the interplay between formal institutional structure which puts forests as state property under control of forest department with informal structure in which accessing forests is a fundamental part of life for tribals irrespective of who owns it legally.

They examine the linkages between the colonial era property rights to forests and conservation policy with the current injustices faced by tribals along with non-recognition of their forest rights. Their findings show that even after years of displacement and exclusion by the state, tribal communities continue to care for and protect their forests. But formal laws and weak implementation of community rights under the Forest Rights Act 2006 leave them insecure, forcing them to navigate fines, bribes, and alienation from their own lands. This paper argues for a shift away from top-down, exclusionary conservation model toward a more just, community-led model that respects Indigenous knowledge and rights, strengthens their role as custodians of the forest, and works with them rather than against them to protect forests.

Guest Lecture | ‘Local Self Government in New England: A case study of Connecticut’ | by Dr. Lalitha Shivaswamy, University of Connecticut

The National Law School of India University (NLSIU) hosted Prof. Lalitha Shivaswamy, (NLS BA LLB 1996), Adjunct Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, for a lecture titled “Local Self Government in New England: A case study of Connecticut.” The lecture took place on Friday, March 27, 2026, at 11 am at the Conference Room, Training Centre, NLSIU.

Abstract

Local Self Government in New England: A case study of Connecticut

This talk and the ensued discussion explored the concept of “Home Rule” as enshrined in the Constitution of the State of Connecticut; the origin of local authority, its historical evolution from the 1600’s to the present day, and the advantages and challenges in day-to-day government in ensuring transparency, checks and balances, and that power remains in the hands of the people.

In her service on both appointed and elected boards, Dr. Shivaswamy is uniquely positioned to discuss her experience of Home Rule in practice.

About the Speaker

Dr. Lalitha Shivaswamy is a native of Bengaluru and an alumna of NLSIU, BA LLB (Hons.) Class of 1996.

She migrated to Connecticut in 1999 with her husband who is also from Bengaluru. She comes from a family of legal scholars, including her grandfather Shri A. R. Somnath Iyer, former Chief Justice of the Mysore High Court, and her father Shri. S Shivaswamy, Advocate. She is the daughter-in-law of Dr. S. Krishnamurthy, IPS (retd.) who was the first LLD recipient from NLSIU in 1992.

Dr. Shivaswamy is the CEO of People First Technologies, an AI platform focussed on employee engagement, and President of Helios Management, a boutique advisory firm. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Previously, she was a venture lending portfolio manager at Horizon Technology Finance and a private placement analyst at Citigroup Global Investments. She was recently elected to public office in the town of Simsbury to serve a six-year term on the Board of Finance, where she is Vice-Chair. She was also appointed as a commissioner on her town’s Charter Revision Commission. Dr. Shivaswamy is an ardent supporter of the choral and performing arts and has successfully demonstrated the power of the arts to engage and unite communities. She recently completed three terms as president of the Board of Governors Hartford Chorale, the region’s principal symphonic chorus. She is currently on the senior leadership team of the Board of Directors of The Hartford Symphony Orchestra, and Board Chair of Choral Arts of New England.

Dr. Shivaswamy obtained an SJD with honors, and an LLM from the University of Connecticut School of Law. She also has an MBA in finance from the University of Connecticut School of Business. She is enrolled in the Connecticut bar and was previously enrolled with the Bar Council of India.

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NLS Faculty Seminar | Do Efficient Farmers Always Move to Non-Agricultural Sectors? Exploring Efficiency and Rural Transformation in India

This week’s faculty seminar featured presentation by Dr. Anviksha Drall, Assistant Professor, Social Science, NLSIU on ‘Do Efficient Farmers Always Move to Non-Agricultural Sectors? Exploring Efficiency and Rural Transformation in India.’

Abstract

To ensure income smoothening due to various agro-climatic and price fluctuations, farmers often engage in activities other than farming. The impact of participation in non-farm work on labour efficiency is vastly explored. However, how labour-specific efficiency of agricultural activities influence decisions on whether to participate in non-farm activities is less known.

In the context of structural rural transformation, the current study investigates if efficient farmers move towards the non-agricultural sector or stick to farming activities only. This study attempts to answer this question based on empirical analysis. The empirical estimation utilises Village Dynamics of South Asia panel data on eight Indian semi-arid and eastern states for a panel of five years (2010-2014).

Anviksha’s empirical results show that farmers highly efficient in agricultural activities decrease their labour supplied to non-agricultural sectors. Further, results based on sub-samples indicate that the result holds true for only medium sized farmers owning 2-10 hectares of land. The mechanism analysis shows that technology adoption influences non-farm labour supply via increased labour efficiency, rendering vital policy implications on structural transformation and role of farming technology.

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Ethics & Texts@NLS Library | ‘Dharma and the Law’ by Dr. Arshia Sattar

The Library Committee at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru is introducing a series of events surrounding the theme “Ethics & Texts”. The first of these will focus on “Ethics & Epics,” and Dr. Arshia Sattar will discuss the topic ‘Dharma and the Law’. Dr. Sattar will consider ideas of dharma as they are presented in the Hindu epics, most especially in Valmiki’s Ramayana, and explore how such classical understandings might be relevant to our times.

The talk will take place from 5:15 pm and is open to the public subject to prior registration.

About the Speaker

Dr. Arshia Sattar is a translator and writer and holds a PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilisations from the University of Chicago. Dr. Sattar has worked with the Valmiki Ramayana for over 30 years and is particularly interested in the epics and storytelling traditions of the Indian sub-continent.

She teaches and writes about classical Indian literature in India and abroad. She has several publications, most notably an abridged translation of the Valmiki Ramayana which has remained in print since 1996. She has been a Fulbright Scholar in Residence at Hampshire College in the U.S. and a Rockefeller Fellow at the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio. Her Mahabharata for Children was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Prize for Children’s Literature in 2022. In 2023, she was conferred the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government for her outstanding contribution to literature.

Book Talks@NLS Library | A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras

The Library Committee at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru is organising a Book Talk on “A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras,” authored by Dr. Kalpana Karunakaran and published by Westland Books in 2025.

The talk will take place from 5:15 pm and is open to the public subject to prior registration.

Panellists:

About the book

A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras is an intimate, yet simultaneously anthropological, exploration of the life of Dr. Karunakaran’s maternal grandmother, Pankajam (1911–2007). The book captures the singularity of an exceptional woman, even as it situates her in a social universe shaped by the conventions of Tamil Brahmin orthodoxy. Dr. Karunakaran conveys with clarity how the ‘utterly ordinary’ life of a ‘woman of no consequence’ (as Pankajam writes of herself), lived out largely within the confines of family and kin, was quite far from ordinary.

The book draws extensively upon letters, glimpses of Pankajam’s life narrated through her thinly-disguised semi-autobiographical short stories that allowed her to ‘say the unsayable’ about love, intimacy and conjugality, and her autobiography, which she began writing in 1949 and kept writing till her last piece in 1995. What comes together is a riveting portrait of heartbreak and violence, yearning and delight, a housewife’s quest for intellectual growth and her talent for friendships across cultures and continents.

In the final reckoning, A Woman of No Consequence is about the chequered trajectories of a newly-born nation as seen through the lens of its daughters – restless women forcing home and nation to reckon with their stubborn striving for self-actualisation.

About the author

Dr. Kalpana Karunakaran is an Associate Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, IIT Madras. Her research and writings are in the intersecting fields of gender, poverty, microcredit, women’s work in the informal sector, women’s trade unions and collective action in solidarity-based movements. A bilingual public speaker and writer in Tamil and English, Dr. Karunakaran conducts workshops and participates actively in campaigns for gender equality, labour rights and human rights organized by women’s movements, trade unions and rural development NGOs in Tamil Nadu. She also writes on women’s lives with a focus on the intersections between the personal and the political. She is the author of Women, Microfinance and the State in Neo-liberal India (Routledge 2017) and the Tamil memoir, Comrade Amma: Magal Parvaiyil Mythily Sivaraman (Comrade Mother: A Daughter’s Portrait of Mythily Sivaraman), published in 2018.

 

Play Reading | The Exception and the Rule by Bertolt Brecht | The Green Room

The Green Room, student-led theatre effort at NLS, invites you to the play reading, featuring The Exception and the Rule by Bertolt Brecht. This session will take the form of a table read followed by a discussion, as per the details below:

Date: April 1, 2026
Time: 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM
Venue: Amphitheatre

About the Play

The Exception and the Rule is a Lehrstück (learning-play) that follows a merchant crossing a desert with his porter under conditions of intense competition. As suspicion and class tension escalate into violence, the play culminates in a courtroom trial that exposes how legal systems can normalise and legitimise inequality.

About the Playwright

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), a pioneering German playwright and director, is best known for developing epic theatre – a form that encourages critical engagement over passive emotional absorption. His works often interrogate social and economic structures through minimal staging and disruptive techniques.

Open to all NLS Community, whether you would like to read a role or simply listen and join the discussion.

Discussion | Public Interest Litigation from a Comparative Perspective: Legitimacy of Judicial Lawmaking

The National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, will host a two–day, closed-door discussion on “Public Interest Litigation from a Comparative Perspective: Legitimacy of Judicial Lawmaking,” on March 28–29, 2026 at the University campus. The discussion is being organised in collaboration with colleagues from the universities of Tilburg and Utrecht, the Netherlands.

This discussion forms part of a broader comparative research initiative examining how courts across jurisdictions engage with questions of legitimacy in public interest litigation (PIL), particularly in cases that raise complex issues at the intersection of law, governance, and public policy. The project brings together insights from multiple jurisdictions, including India, South Africa, the United States, and the Netherlands, and seeks to better understand how courts justify and construct their authority in such cases. The closed-door meeting focusses on India as an important case study because of its distinctive experiences with PILs.

The discussion will convene a select group of judges, legal practitioners, academics, and researchers to engage in focussed discussions on these themes. Deliberations will centre on key dimensions of judicial legitimacy in PILs, including questions of access to courts, judicial reasoning and fact-finding practices, and the design and impact of remedies.

As a closed-door discussion, participation is by invitation only. The format is designed to facilitate in-depth and candid exchanges among participants, contributing to an ongoing research effort and fostering collaborative academic engagement.

The discussions are expected to inform future research outputs, including comparative scholarship and potential policy-relevant insights on judicial lawmaking in public interest cases.

Play Screening | C. P. Taylor’s ‘Good’ | By The Green Room

The student-led theatre effort at NLS, The Green Room, is organising a screening of ‘Good’ by C. P. Taylor, presented as part of the National Theatre production as per the details below:

Date: March 25, 2026
Time: 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM
Venue: NAB 205

The Green Room is a nod to the intimate, lively backstage space in theatres where artists gather before a performance. The screening will be followed by an open discussion. 

About the Play

Set in 1930s Germany, Good follows John Halder, a liberal academic who slowly becomes complicit in the Nazi regime. What begins as a series of small, seemingly reasonable compromises made for career stability and personal convenience gradually leads to a profound moral collapse. The play examines how, unlike overt fanaticism, ordinary decency erodes under pressure, exposing the unsettling ease with which self-justification and ambition enable participation in systemic violence.

What makes Good particularly urgent today is its focus on incremental complicity that emerges through everyday choices. It reminds us that harm is often normalised in subtle ways, and that individuals rarely see themselves as doing wrong, even as they become part of unjust systems.

About the Playwright

C. P. Taylor (1929–1981) was a Scottish dramatist known for his politically engaged theatre. He wrote widely on history and morality, often blending these themes with elements of dark irony, with Good standing as his most acclaimed and enduring play.

NLS Faculty Seminar | Kabir: Within Bhakti and Without?

This week’s faculty seminar featured presentation by Dr. Rinku Lamba, Associate Professor, Social Science, NLSIU on ‘Kabir: Within Bhakti and Without?’

Abstract

Many prominent anti-colonial Indian thinkers recalled the phenomenon of bhakti as relevant for constructions and imaginations of political community. Among the pantheon of recalled poet-saints is Kabir (15C) who even today is known for the “confident” and “passionate” way in which he was “ever at odds with the world around him, always ready to fling the dart of criticism in the direction of established religion.” (Hawley and Jeurgensmeyer 2004 35)

Much reception of Kabir closely associates him with bhakti, which in turn is known to offer conceptual space for a critique of caste hierarchies and also for its equivocal stance on questions of democratic power.  However, a closer perusal of Kabir’s verses reveals their preoccupation with the themes of persuasion and judgment, and these are themes that demand reckoning with Kabir’s thought alongside but also outside of the frames of bhakti.  Such attention to these themes, in conjunction with a focus on other features of Kabir’s perspective – such as the individualism he expresses and/through his stance on religion – can illuminate significant aspects of the cultures of secularity and democracy in India.

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Roundtable on ‘Land Revenue Law Reform’ | By MoHUA Chair on Urban Poor and the Law, NLSIU

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) Chair on Urban Poor and the Law at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru is organising a roundtable (RT) on ‘land revenue law reform’. The RT will be held on Monday, March 23, 2026, from 9:30 AM to 1:45 PM in hybrid format, at the Bangalore International Centre, Domlur, and online.

About the Roundtable

The roundtable intends to take stock of, and reflect upon, the various significant developments that have taken place in the field of land laws in India over the last few years. Recently, the Supreme Court’s decision in Samiullah vs. State of Bihar raised several important legal and policy issues — are Indian laws clear on the differences between “registration” and “title”? How can technological solutions play a role in cutting through cumbersome procedures? What documents are necessary and sufficient to prove title? The Supreme Court has instructed the Law Commission of India to prepare a detailed report on these questions.

The Government of Karnataka has undertaken significant reforms in land revenue administration, registration systems, and stamp duty frameworks, with a view to enhancing efficiency, transparency, and legal certainty in land governance. Building on these efforts, Karnataka’s 2025-26 Budget proposes a new land revenue legislation to be enacted after a comprehensive study for effective implementation at the field level.

At this RT, we will bring together senior members of the Government, scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to share their expertise and perspectives on these critical issues. Faculty from the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge – Prof. Martin Dixon, Prof. Shailaja Fennell, and Dr Lovleen Bhullar – will join faculty from the National Law School of India at three distinct panel discussions on themes concerning land law reform:

Panel 1

  • Conclusive land titling: Despite mandatory registration under the Transfer of Property Act, 1882, India’s land system remains rooted in presumptive title, with fragmented records and competing claims. This panel examines the shift from presumptive to conclusive titling, with particular focus on questions of legal finality, error correction mechanisms, and the institutional architecture required to sustain such a system.

Panel 2

  • Comparative perspectives on land revenue law and reform: Panel 2 seeks to examine the shift in land governance toward facilitating industrial and renewable energy development. As land revenue law increasingly intersects with questions of planning, agriculture, and sustainability, this panel brings a comparative perspective to examine how different jurisdictions navigate these competing priorities and what lessons they offer for Karnataka’s evolving reform trajectory.

Panel 3

  • Land use and environmental perspectives: As environmental considerations (re)shape prevailing conceptions of what a ‘productive’ use of land entails, this panel examines the evolving interface between land revenue law and ecological governance. It explores how land use controls mediate tensions between development, proprietary interests, and sustainability, and whether revenue frameworks can meaningfully respond to emerging environmental priorities.