News Type: Event

In this week’s faculty seminar Varsha Aithala, Assistant Professor of Law, presented a paper titled ‘Can making a law be playful? A case for designing for democratic deliberation in India,’ with co-authors Siddharth Peter de Souza and Saumya Varma.

Siddharth Peter de Souza is the founder of Justice Adda, a law and design social venture in India. He is also an Assistant Professor in AI and Society at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick. Saumya Varma, a senior consultant with Justice Adda, is a public policy professional with a background in legislative research and strategic consulting.

Abstract

This paper explores the potential of legal design as an imaginative and playful approach to developing, understanding, and disseminating law. Through a case study that discusses the development of a board game project titled ‘Sabha’ which is the outcome of a multi-year project by Justice Adda developed in partnership with the Hanns Seidel Stiftung, the paper explores what design can do to build meaningful deliberation in democratic societies. ‘Sabha’ is designed as a print-and-play interactive multiplayer board game. It seeks to immerse players in the ‘world’ of the Indian Parliament, and to inform and educate players about Parliamentary procedures, the roles and responsibilities of parliamentary representatives, and the process of law-making. The paper contextualises the need for ‘Sabha’ within the evolution of the Indian parliament and its relationship with the people it represents. By discussing concepts of ‘playful’ pedagogy in the development of the game, the paper explains that the value of using legal design in this process of game design. It argues that such an approach is valuable to not only to think beyond the typical form of the law, but also to be free of the typical spaces of the law.

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In this week’s faculty seminar Aparajita Lath, Assistant Professor of Law, presented her article titled ‘The Doctrine of Greater Care: Pharmaceutical Trademarks in India.’ The seminar was held on August 6, 2025, in the Ground Floor Conference Hall at NLSIU’s Training Centre.

Abstract

The Indian market for pharmaceuticals is filled with ‘sound-alike’ and ‘look-alike’ drugs. There are several examples of different pharmaceutical companies using the same or similar name for different drugs. Not only do such trademarks co-exist in the market but also on the Trade Marks Register (under class 5). This practice has emerged in India due to the growth of a pharmaceutical industry that specialises in generic drugs. On the assumption that generic medicines are substitutes for the innovator’s brand, the Indian pharmaceutical industry has developed a language of its own. It is common in the trade to use brand names that have common suffixes or prefixes that indicate the drug’s purpose, strength or performance. As a result, the same drug and often different drugs may be sold under similar names by different companies.

Regulatorily and clinically, however, Indian generic drugs may not be interchangeable. Given this reality, the language prevalent in the pharmaceutical market has increased confusion with risk of serious consequences to public health and safety. In the absence of regulatory review of drug names in India, courts and the Trade Mark Office have grappled with resolving issues of confusion and harms to public health and safety in pharmaceutical trademark infringement cases and registration proceedings. While the Supreme Court has applied the doctrine of “greater care” to prevent confusion between pharmaceuticals in India, several inconsistencies prevail. This article traces the development of and defines the “doctrine of greater care” in India. It proposes an expansion to the doctrine suitable for the Indian context. It also provides practical and implementable solutions. These changes are in line with the spirit of the Trade Marks Act which focusses not just on protecting commercial interests but also on public health and safety.

NLSIU, in collaboration with the Bangalore International Centre (BIC), organised the launch of ‘A Logic of Populism: India and its States’ (Cambridge University Press, June 2025), authored by Dr. Srikrishna Ayyangar, Associate Professor at NLSIU.

The launch event was held at BIC on August 10, 2025 from 5.30 pm to 7 pm. The launch was followed by a discussion on ‘Is there an Indian Way of Populism?’ and a Q&A session with the audience.

Event Schedule

• Introduction by Vibha Swaminathan (NLS LLB 2025) & 2025 Rhodes Scholar-elect
• Opening remarks from Dr. Srikrishna Ayyangar, Author of the book
• Panel discussion
• Q&A

Synopsis

Is populism a threat or a corrective to democracy? Can it be both and at the same time?

Much public commentary on populists has been pulled in different directions, and it seems almost impossible that we can cohere out of this polarised conundrum and into a shared understanding (even if disagreement) of meanings and labels around this concept. What indeed is the role of populism in political modernisation, and its place in a democracy, beyond the Americas and Europe?

Populists are often understood in terms of who they are – rather who we think they are. This discussion will centre around the recent book ‘A Logic of Populism: India and its States’ (Cambridge University Press 2025) that tries to understand populists in terms of what they do. Author, Srikrishna Ayyangar, argues that what populists do is to divide people, for the greater common good, and so who they are depends on political affiliations within the democratic context. Evoking the ‘Indian way’ inspired by A.K Ramanujan’s celebrated essay that the title of this discussion draws from, Ashutosh Varshney and Mahesh Rangarajan along with Sudhir Krishnaswamy as the moderator will engage in a conversation around the book and the relevance of the theme to India’s democracy.

Watch the Video

Author

Dr. Srikrishna Ayyangar is Associate Professor, Social Science at NLSIU, Bengaluru. He has previously taught at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, the University of the South – Sewanee, and the University of Hartford, and worked at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. His research has been published in journals including the Studies in International Comparative Development and Studies in Indian Politics.

Panellists

Dr. Mahesh Rangarajan is professor of Environmental Studies and History at Ashoka University. He is the author of several books that include Fencing the Forest (OUP 1996), India’s Wildlife History (Permanent Black 2001) and Nature and Nation (Permanent Black 2015) among many other edited and coedited books. He has also been a commentator on current affairs with the audio-visual media in both English and Hindi. He was Director, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (2011-15) and has also served as Vice Chancellor, Krea University (2021-22).

Mr. Ashutosh Varshney is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Brown University, where he was also the Founding Director of the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia. Previously, he taught at Harvard (1989-98) and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2001-2008). His books include Battles Half Won: India’s Improbable Democracy, Collective Violence in Indonesia, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, India in the Era of Economic Reforms, and Democracy, Development and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India.

The awards based on his research include the Guggenheim fellowship, the Carnegie Fellowship, the Gregory Luebbert Prize, and the Daniel Lerner Prize. In addition to professional journals, he also contributes guest columns to newspapers and magazines and is currently a columnist for The Print.

Prof. (Dr.) Sudhir Krishnaswamy is the Vice-Chancellor of NLSIU, Bengaluru and the Secretary-Treasurer of the Consortium of National Law Universities. He is a Member of the Independent Oversight Board that makes content moderation decisions on Facebook and Instagram platforms. He is the recipient of the Infosys Prize 2022 in the Humanities category.

He is the Co-founder and Managing Trustee of the Centre for Law and Policy Research, Bengaluru, that engages in law and policy research, social and governance interventions and strategic impact litigation; and the Founder of the Supreme Court Observer which is the most reliable guide to the work of the Supreme Court of India.

His current research focusses on constitutional law, the empirical analysis of the legal, political and governance systems and the regulation of new and emerging technologies including artificial intelligence and automated decision systems.

Introduction

Vibha Swaminathan recently graduated from the LLB (Hons) programme at NLSIU and is a 2025 Rhodes Scholar-elect. She will read for the BCL at Oxford University, and is interested in examining the political and legal fragilities of citizenship, generated along intersectional axes of class, gender and religion.

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In this week’s faculty seminar, Bharath Gururagavendran, Assistant Professor of Law, presented his paper titled ‘Fair Play in the Digital Infrastructural Era.’ The seminar was held on July 30, 2025, in the Ground Floor Conference Hall at NLSIU’s Training Centre.

Abstract

This paper interrogates the normative architecture of digital public infrastructures (DPIs) through a fair play (FP) analysis, arguing that contemporary data-driven welfare schemes, though formally consent-based, optimal, and aligned with prevailing accounts of the FP principle, nonetheless misallocate burdens and benefits and generate distinct semiotic harms that urge retheorisation of FP. Developing Uṭal Nalam Tiṭṭam (UNT), a fictional healthcare infrastructure modelled on India’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, the paper examines how such schemes disproportionately compel data contributions from structurally disadvantaged users while legitimising opt-outs by more privileged participants. Through stylised case studies embedded within UNT (Farmer, Consultant, Compassionate Lawyer), it asks whether, and under what conditions, refusals to contribute constitute wrongful free riding, and whether schemes that are formally voluntary but functionally coercive can satisfy the requirements of fair play. Methodologically, the paper adopts a diagnostic approach grounded in political theory and institutional analysis.

The argument proceeds in two parts. First, it applies the FP principle to contemporary DPI regimes (as instantiated in UNT), drawing on formal accounts developed by Rawls, Cullity, Tosi, Trifan, and Brown. Second, it reverses the lens, using UNT to show how the institutional logic of digital infrastructures unsettles core assumptions in these accounts. It demonstrates how algorithmic and infrastructural design embeds normative claims about public value and fairness in ways that constrain exit, deepen dependence, and distort the terms of consent, reciprocity, and political obligation. Contra Tosi, the paper challenges the view that FP applies only to interactions governed by the express rules of cooperative schemes, revealing how background conditions shape participation in ways that undermine voluntariness and skew burden distribution. Contra Brown, it questions whether reciprocity-based obligations can remain discretionary in schemes that unequally structure agents’ capacity to choose. The paper argues that UNT fails both the justice and acceptance conditions of FP: it compels the least powerful to surrender privacy for access, while affording the affluent and digitally literate, a normatively unexamined right to abstain. Crucially, the paper contends that this asymmetry is not merely distributive or instrumental, but expressive. It erodes the normative foundations of cooperation itself. It concludes by identifying conceptual blind spots that demand a re-theorisation of fair play attuned to the design logics of digital governance.

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