• Dates: May 14 and 15, 2026
• Venue: National Law School of India University (NLSIU) Campus

Workshop details

With rising urban temperatures, Bangalore needs collective and inclusive strategies to adapt to the heat. This two-day workshop brings together planners, researchers, communities, and decision-makers to co-create cooling solutions with a focus on Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) and existing policies.

The focus of the workshop will be two-fold:

First, the workshop will showcase the findings of the collaborative research project between NLSIU, University of Toronto Mississauga (Canada), Brandies University (USA) and University of Rajasthan funded by the University of Toronto India Foundation on urban heat islands in Bengaluru and Jaipur.

Specifically, the focus during the two days will be on how socio-spatial inequalities shape experiences of heat in Bengaluru. Through a combination of literature review, GIS-based spatial analysis, household surveys, and policy review, the project has generated evidence on patterns of heat exposure, differential access to BGI, and the governance challenges associated with equitable urban climate adaptation.

Second, the workshop aims to initiate discussions across diverse stakeholders on the unequal exposure to heat and access to mitigation strategies in Bengaluru. The workshop intends to bring the findings of the project into conversation with practitioners, community representatives, researchers, and public officials. The plenary session will focus on grounded discussion on implementation of inclusive actions.

Session details

Day 1: Framing the Challenge and Sharing Knowledge

Click here for Day 1 schedule and session details

Day 2: Planning Cooling Futures

Click here for Day 2 schedule and session details

The JSW Centre for the Future of Law at NLSIU is organising a talk and discussion on the topic, ‘Two Facets of AI and Law: Creativity and Privacy,’ by Advocate Srinath Sridevan, Senior Advocate practising before the Madras High Court and the Founding Partner of HSB Partners.

• Day & date: Friday, May 15, 2026
• Time: 2:00 – 3:00 PM
• Venue: National Law School of India University (NLSIU) Campus 

The talk is open to the public with mandatory registration here.

About the Speaker

Advocate Srinath Sridevan is a Senior Advocate practising before the Madras High Court and is the Founding Partner of HSB Partners, a leading full-service law firm in Chennai. With over two decades at the Bar, he is widely recognised for his expertise in commercial litigation, arbitration, insolvency, and corporate law.

A sixth-generation lawyer, Srinath combines deep legal tradition with a global outlook. He graduated with a gold medal in law from Madras University and went on to pursue an LL.M. from New York University, later working with international firms such as Allen & Overy in London before returning to India to establish his practice.

Beyond litigation, he is a thought leader in the intersection of law, technology, and society. He has written and spoken extensively on artificial intelligence (AI), large language models (LLMs), and their implications for legal practice and adjudication. His work and talks often explore how technology can enhance efficiency while preserving the core principles of judicial reasoning and fairness, a question that is increasingly relevant as courts cautiously experiment with AI-assisted processes.

Srinath is also deeply committed to public interest and access to justice, having worked on impactful litigation, including efforts to improve conditions for manual scavengers through collaboration with civil society groups.

A frequent speaker and mentor, he brings to his talks a rare combination of courtroom experience, academic insight, and forward-looking engagement with legal technology, making him a compelling voice on the future of AI and the law.

This week’s faculty seminar will feature a presentation by Dr. Swati Narayan, Assistant Professor, NLSIU, on ‘The Right to Retire: Universal Social Pensions in India.’

Abstract

More than sixty percent of the workforce in the Global South are in informal employment. Retirement is a luxury that few can afford, especially women. The capability approach emphasises the need for expansion of ‘substantive freedoms’ especially of the most vulnerable citizens. However, developing countries, such as India, often have inadequate social pension regimes to support adults in their older years. This paper with secondary data analyses the history, evolution and gaps in India’s pension regime with exclusions due to defective targeting, inadequate budgets, gender biases and faulty last mile delivery. Then it analyses the comparative political economy of social pensions in three pioneering countries of the Global South – Georgia, Nepal and South Africa. Based on this cumulative analysis, the research provides cost estimates for the universal expansion of the legal right to social pensions in India.

The Commons Cell and the Centre for Environmental Law Education, Research and Advocacy (CEERA) are jointly organising a panel discussion titled ‘Reading the City through Water – Stormwater, Systems, and the Ground Truthing at NLSIU on Monday, May 11, 2026, from 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm. 

Venue: Allen and Overy Hall, Training Centre, First floor

About the discussion:

This discussion on stormwater systems in Bangalore will unpack how design, data, governance, and planning inform everyday urban life by examining how infrastructure is experienced, used, and often contested on the ground. The first half of the discussion will be focussed on MOD Foundation’s work on the K100 stormwater drain in Bangalore. The focus will be to enhance citizen engagement with public infrastructure by showcasing how to read stormwater networks on a map as well as lived systems shaped by design gaps, ecological pressures, and governance overlaps. The second half of the discussion will focus on stormwater systems as commons and how current water regulations address these systems. As urban water infrastructure, these systems shape everyday life, and collective knowledge can significantly contribute to better urban futures.

Our Panellists

• Amrita Ganapathy, Senior Urban Designer and Researcher at Mod Foundation
• Nikhila Gudipati is an Urban Research Associate at Mod Foundation working at the intersection of Strategy, Data Visualisation and Analysis.
• Dr. Sneha Thapliyal, Associate Professor (Economics), National Law School of India University
• Dr. Gayathri Naik, Assistant Professor (Law), National Law School of India University

The Centre for the Study of Social Inclusion (CSSI), at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru is organising a webinar on ‘India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of Electoral Rolls,’ as per the details below:

• Day & date: Sunday, May 10, 2026
• Tim: 11.00 AM – 1:10 PM
• Venue:  online

Open to the public. Register on Zoom here.

The webinar will open with introductory remarks by Prof. (Dr.) Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Vice Chancellor, NLSIU and will be followed by two panel discussions.

Panel 1: Impact of the Special Intensive Revision on 12 states (11 a.m. to 12.10 p.m.)

• Prof. Yogendra Yadav, Member, Swaraj Abhiyan
• Dr. Srinivasan Ramani, Associate Editor, The Hindu
• Dr. Swati Narayan, Assistant Professor, NLSIU (moderator and commentator)

Panel 2: The Constitutional and Legal implications of the Special Intensive Revision (12.10 p.m. to 1.10 p.m.)

• Dr. Kamala Sankaran, Ford Foundation Chair in Public Interest Law, NLSIU
• S. Y. Quraishi, Former Chief Election Commissioner
• Prashant Bhushan, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India
• Jasmine Joseph, Assistant Professor, NLSIU (moderator and commentator)

About the webinar

This online dialogue seeks to analyse and encourage research on the legal and policy nuances of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), especially in terms of the impact on marginalised communities.

In June 2025, the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced a SIR in the state of Bihar to clean electoral rolls. While SIR was immediately challenged in the Supreme Court by a swathe of petitions, analysts argue that this exercise in Bihar alone could have potentially been the largest voter disenfranchisement in the world in the 21st century.

Article 324 of the Constitution and the 1950 Representation of the People Act entrusts the ECI with the preparation of electoral rolls, but not the mandate to determine citizenship. However, from October 2025 the ECI has expanded the SIR exercise to 12 states nationwide, with 18 more states on the anvil. Therefore, there is a need for nuanced research and debate on the legal precedents that it sets and its repercussions on Indian electoral democracy.

Webinar Schedule

Related links:

• The SIR, A Long Road to Exile? by Darashana Mitra, Assistant Professor of Law, NLSIU (The India Forum)
• Dr. Swati Narayan’s (Assistant Professor, NLSIU) remarks in an Al Jazeera story here.

The Research Office at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) is organising a Research Colloquium which will see a paper presentation by Dr. Shireen Azam, Postdoctoral Fellow at NLSIU on the topic, “Between True Mohammedan and True Caste: The Missing Muslim Lower Caste in Colonial India.”

• Day & date: Monday, May 11, 2026
• Time: 4:00 – 5.30 PM
• Venue: Conference Room, Training Centre, Ground Floor, NLSIU 

Abstract

This paper demonstrates that caste in Muslims provides a missing piece in the scholarly understanding of the reconstitution of caste and religious identities in Modern India. Caste in Muslim communities has attracted some scholarly attention in the last two decades (I Ahmed 2003, Alam 2003, Ansari 2018, A Ahmed 2023, Azam 2023, H Shah 2023). However, the evidence of caste in Muslims has not done much to inform the study of the category of the Muslim which is extremely potent in modern India – as a religious minority, and as Aamir Mufti (1995) famously articulated, the other against which the modern national self is constructed.

Why does caste remain conceptually anomalous in studying Muslims in the Indian subcontinent? This paper probes the sociological and anthropological construction of the category of the Muslim in colonial knowledge production and representative politics in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century India, through the lens of Muslim-caste. The empirical “revelation” of Muslims being caste subjects posed an epistemic threat to foundational assumptions about religion and race that structured the colonial-Brahminical knowledge order. This confoundment was resolved through the reiteration of epistemic cleavages that consolidated the categories of the “true Mahomedan”— the foreigner — and “true caste,” construed as Hindu. This has consequences for the commonsense that comes to structure the category of “the Muslim” as it emerges and participates in shaping the nation’s future in the twentieth century.

This week’s faculty seminar will feature a presentation by Dr. Devyani Pande, Assistant Professor, Public Policy, NLSIU on ‘Educating for Policy: Disciplinary Foundations of Public Policy Curricula in India.’ Her co-authors are Ishani Mukherjee, & Dayashankar Maurya.

Abstract

Public policy schools around the world have each had their unique struggle towards balancing multi-disciplinarity and contextualisation of public policy education. With the proliferation of public policy education in the Global South, there is still a lack of comparative literature examining the design and delivery of these programs and the extent to which they align with Global North approach and local context as well as meet the vision of multi-disciplinarity.

India has been an interesting case due to the uptick of public policy institutions in recent years offering degrees at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Given this trend, how is the curriculum in policy education being organised in India? The authors examine the curricula of 52 public policy institutes in India using the novel method of topic modelling to identify key themes in the stated objectives of institutions and course offerings. While on one hand they find partial convergence with major topics covered in the core curriculum of Global North institutes along with multi-disciplinarity, on the other hand they find no indication of any emerging pattern of institutionalising public policy curricula in India.

Where there is some alignment, it is mostly limited to course offerings that are based on the broader context or specialisation of the institutes themselves. The emphasis on research is also evident across programmes in line with their objectives. They propose several layers of factors that contribute to this variegated offering of courses at the national level -comprising context, purpose, and desired outcomes and institutional level (institutional endowment, job market requirements, indigenisation/localisation).

The National Law School India University (NLSIU)is hosting a guest lecture on the topic, ‘The Emerging Global Order: From Liberalism to Illiberalism and Beyond,’ by Prof. (Dr.) B.S. Chimni as per the details below. The lecture is being held as part of NLSIU’s collaboration with the University of Zurich.

• Day & date: Wednesday, May 6, 2026
• Time: 5:00 PM
• Venue: Conference Hall, Training Centre

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A, which will be moderated by Dr Akhila Basalalli, Assistant Professor, NLSIU.

About the Lecture:

The global order is being rapidly transformed by a range of economic, environmental, political, and technological factors with radical implications for the future of humankind. In this backdrop the lecture will explore four questions to understand the ongoing transition from a liberal to an illiberal global order, its impact, and how nations and global civil society can address troubling outcomes. The questions are: What features manifest the emergence of an illiberal order? What are the reasons for the transition to an illiberal global order? Is the transition to an illiberal global order irreversible? Do we need a new social and political imagination to usher in a peaceful and just global order? The overall aim is to initiate a conversation on critical issues of our times.

About the Speaker:

Prof. (Dr.) B.S. Chimni served as a Professor of International Law at the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s (JNU) School of International Studies and was Vice-Chancellor of W.B. National University of Juridical Sciences (WBNUJS) (2004–2006). He has been a Visiting Professor at Brown and Tokyo Universities, the Graduate Institute, Geneva and the American University of Cairo, and has been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard, Minnesota, and York (Canada) universities and the Institute of Advanced Studies, Nantes. He has been elected an associate member of the Institut de Droit International, and is a member of the Academic Council, Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School.

He is a former Member of the Governing Council, Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) and Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), and a former Member, National Legal Services Authority (NLSA). In 2022, he was honoured by the American Society of International Law with its Honorary Membership. The University of London has instituted a scholarship in his name for the MA in Refugee Protection and Forced Migration Studies by Distance Learning. He has also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has delivered several prestigious lectures, most recently the 2023 Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures at Cambridge University. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Indian Journal of International Law.