Ms. Pratiksha S. Basarkar graduated with a BA LLB (Hons) from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore in 2018, where she was awarded the Heyning-Roelli Foundation Scholarship to attend a semester at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Since graduation, Pratiksha has worked as a litigation lawyer across roles. She began her career at a major law firm before joining Project 39A (now The Square Circle Clinic, NALSAR University of Law), a criminal justice organization. Here she led teams providing pro bono legal representation to persons sentenced to death before the Supreme Court of India and various High Courts, contributing to several acquittals and commutations of sentences. She has facilitated mitigation investigations and worked on strategic litigation addressing broader issues in the criminal justice system, such as unreliable forensic evidence and mental healthcare in prisons. Beyond litigation, she has written on new criminal laws and engaged with stakeholders including social workers and policy researchers through training and discussions.
As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Pratiksha is pursuing an LLM at Harvard Law School. She is studying comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to criminal law and systemic reform, with a focus on wrongful convictions, to inform litigation and reform efforts in India.