International Legal Studies Archives

Nivedhitha Kalyanaraman

Nivedhitha is a Lawyer specializing in Constitutional Law. She graduated with a BA LLB from Alliance University, Bangalore in 2014, where she secured the gold medal for academic excellence.

She served as a Law Clerk and Research Associate to Dr. Justice Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud, the former Chief Justice of India, for nearly four years. She worked on crucial constitutional issues. She assisted the Chief Justice on the cases relating to the challenge to Electoral Bonds, the sub-classification within the Scheduled Castes, the right to marriage of queer persons, the special status of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, the minority status of Aligarh Muslim University, the challenge to the abrogation of special status to Jammu and Kashmir, and the ban on Media One, among others. During her clerkship tenure, she also worked on drafting the Handbook on Combating Gender Stereotypes and the Sensitization Module for the Judiciary on LGBTQIA+, both published by the Supreme Court of India. She is currently working on a project on electoral democracy at the Vidhi Center for Legal Policy, New Delhi.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Nivedhitha is studying constitutional law and philosophy with a focus on the law of democracy. She wishes to identify the social, political, and legal structures that dilute electoral democracy during her study in the United States. After returning to India, Nivedhitha plans to work towards strengthening the democratic process through impactful legal and policy interventions.

Anviti Chaturvedi

Ms. Anviti Chaturvedi is an officer of the Indian Foreign Service, with over 10 years of work experience in law, policy and diplomacy. Currently, she is posted as Political & Media Officer in the Embassy of India, Tokyo.

Anviti graduated with a BA LLB from the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. Thereafter, she worked as a senior analyst with PRS Legislative Research, New Delhi, supporting Members of Parliament with research across a range of sectors including external affairs, defense and home affairs.

As part of her diplomatic duties, Anviti was deployed as Liaison Officer at the G7 Summit, Hiroshima, and the G20 Summit, New Delhi, in 2023. She also had the opportunity to be a part of the Indian delegation in various high-level bilateral (India-Japan) and Quad (Australia-India-Japan-US) dialogues in Tokyo. Concurrently, with her role as Political and Media Officer, she served as the officer-in-charge of bilateral relations with the Republic of the Marshall Islands. While posted in Tokyo, Anviti also studied the Japanese language, and attained a high-level of proficiency.

Under the Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Fellowship, Anviti is pursuing an LLM focusing on the intersection of law of the sea, technology regulation, and national security law. After completing the course, she intends to work in areas relating to international law and India’s policy initiatives in the Indo-Pacific region, while serving with the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India.

Disha Wadekar

Ms. Disha Wadekar is an independent advocate practicing before the Supreme Court of India and various High Courts in India. Her practice focuses on representing marginalized communities on matters pertaining to constitutional law and anti-discrimination law. She has worked on many constitution bench matters, including the famous Sabarimala temple entry case and the economically weaker section (EWS) reservation case. In 2022, she was appointed the Assistant Special Public Prosecutor by the Government of Rajasthan.

An engineer-turned-lawyer, Ms. Wadekar completed her undergraduate law degree from Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU), Pune. She has taught courses on law and marginalization at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, and National Law University, Delhi, and has delivered lectures at various institutions. She is also a member of the academic committee on Denotified Tribes at SPPU, Pune, and of the research ethics committee at the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies (IIDS), Delhi.

In 2021, Ms. Wadekar co-founded Community for the Eradication of Discrimination in Education and Employment (CEDE)—an organization working towards a diverse and inclusive Indian legal profession and the judiciary. She has also provided consultancy to organizations, such as the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, Delhi. Her work has been published by reputed journals and online portals.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellowship, Ms. Wadekar is pursuing LLM from Columbia University. She hopes to learn about the feminist, indigenous, and critical race critiques of the justice system. She believes her fellowship will enable her to contribute to litigation, research, and advocacy interventions that foreground rights-based anti-caste and intersectional perspectives in the Indian justice system.

Payoshi Roy

Ms. Payoshi Roy has practiced as a criminal defense lawyer since graduating from National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata in 2015. Her practice focuses on representing prisoners on death row and indigent persons sentenced to life imprisonment before the Supreme Court of India and the Bombay High Court. In defending activists and terror accused, she has contested state excesses and abuse of anti-terror legislations in India. She also represents victims in custodial death cases challenging police impunity to ensure prosecution of police officers. Outside of courts, she has taught courses on capital punishment and criminal law in law schools across India.

Through her master’s in law as a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, Ms. Roy is undertaking comparative interdisciplinary research on sentencing, abuse of anti-terror laws, and institutional reform.

Parul Mehra

Ms. Parul Mehra graduated from the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore in 2017 with a bachelor’s in law and social sciences. She was awarded the Sh. Venkatramanna Gold Medal for excellence in labor law and headed two student bodies – the International Affairs Society and the Academic Support Program.

Ms. Mehra started her career with the United Nations (UN) in Nairobi, Kenya in 2018, where she joined the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to support efforts to secure the release of thousands of irregular migrants in detention across East Africa. She then moved to Somalia where she supported the federal government in overhauling the immigration and passport law. Subsequently, she led the development of a training program on migrant worker protection for labor inspectors in Libya alongside managing a nation-wide market assessment to inform Libya’s labor migration policy. Parul has recently rejoined IOM in Kenya as an International Migration Law Expert where she is leading training initiatives on migrant rights for a variety of stakeholders including journalists and immigration officers.

Ms. Srivastava is also an adept swimmer, diver, and paddle board surfer. Combining her passion for water sports with environmental conservation, she is involved in several coastal community conservation initiatives in India, Kenya, and Tunisia.

A master’s in international legal studies from Harvard Law School will allow Ms. Srivastava to further hone her knowledge and skills in supporting better governance of human migration. She hopes to leverage this knowledge to improve access to basic rights for migrant workers in India and other developing country contexts.

Zubin Dash

Mr. Zubin Dash is an advocate practicing at the Supreme Court, various High Courts, and Tribunals in India since 2016. He has been involved in constitutional and criminal litigation for the enforcement of fundamental rights and civil liberties. He is the youngest researcher to have been awarded the prestigious Lok Sabha Research Fellowship by the Speaker of Parliament and has authored a book on privacy laws in India. He appeared before a Parliamentary Committee, submitted reports, and assisted Parliamentarians with legislative-drafting and policymaking in the areas of privacy law, data-protection, and surveillance-reforms. Previously, Mr. Dash was consulted by the government for suggesting legislative amendments relating to national security. He also worked as Research Assistant to a former Supreme Court Judge.

Mr. Dash graduated from the National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS) with a gold medal for successfully representing India at the Jessup International Moot-Court Competition, Washington DC, USA and was adjudged ‘Best Speaker’ at a similar competition. He has completed courses from the Hague Academy of International Law and ISIL and is a member of the American Society of International Law and the Commonwealth Lawyers’ Association. He was on the editorial boards of the NUJS Law Review and the National Police Academy Criminal Law Review and has seven publications to his credit.

During his LLM at Columbia University, Mr. Dash will focus on constitutional law, civil liberties, and criminal justice. In particular, he plans to study how technology impacts the enjoyment of rights, the changing relationship between the state, citizens, and corporate entities, and comparative constitutional theory.

Megha Bahl

Ms. Megha Bahl has been practicing criminal law in Delhi for the last seven years. Through research and litigation, she has engaged with the legal issues underlying incidents of custodial violence, sexual offenses, the stifling of journalistic freedoms, and the criminalization of the lives of indigenous people and manual scavengers, among others. She has worked with teams on the prosecution and defense sides of the criminal justice system, acquiring an in-depth understanding of the functioning of institutions like courts, police, and prisons.

Before this, Ms. Bahl obtained her master’s degree in sociology from the prestigious Delhi School of Economics. This academic training and her long engagement with organizations working on issues concerning the democratic rights of people have helped her identify the socio-political reasons for the occurrence of crimes. She has also understood the operation of power that determines access to justice and the availability of rights to victims and accused persons.

After completing her training under the Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Fellowship, Ms. Bahl intends to start a research and litigation clinic in India focusing on interventions that impact the constitutional rights of accused persons and victims in the criminal justice system. A synthesis of academic discourse, courtroom observation, and the lived experiences of people will help generate and disseminate meaningful ideas towards developing more humane jurisprudential practices in India.

Soumya Anakkavur Katchi

Ms. Soumya AK graduated in 2018 from National Law University, Delhi. She worked in a leading all service firm before shifting to a criminal justice reform and litigation center, Project 39A where she has worked for over two years on issues pertaining to mental health and criminal justice in India. As part of her work, she has also worked on death penalty cases with mental health concerns. She has also developed a first-of-its-kind course on forensic mental health in collaboration with Monash University at Australia. Currently, she is working on an empirical study on the insanity defense in India and leads the communications and outreach work at Project 39A.

At Columbia University, she is specializing in the domain of criminal justice and human rights, with a specific focus on examining institutional barriers and development of access to justice mechanisms for the vulnerable and marginalized, from the perspective of the right to a fair and just trial. On returning to India, she intends to continue with her focus on these issues and expects that the master’s degree will inform and enable both her research on these issues as well as advocacy and capacity building with the stakeholders in the criminal justice system.

Aman Gupta

Dr. Aman Gupta obtained a bachelor’s in engineering from the University of Delhi in 2005. Thereafter, he went to business school at the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow, completing his MBA in 2007. He spent a term at the University of Lyon, France, as part of this course. Dr. Gupta worked as a credit rating analyst, from 2008 to 2010, with CRISIL Limited (a Standard and Poor’s Enterprise) and spent a few years as a co-founder of a start-up until late 2011. In December 2011, he joined the Indian Corporate Law Service of the Government of India, which regulates the functioning of companies in India.

Dr. Gupta joined the premier Indian Administrative Service in 2013 and has undertaken several assignments in the Government of NCT of Delhi and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. Along with his work in the civil service, he has also completed a bachelor’s degree in law from the University of Delhi and a Ph.D. in management from the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow.

Dr. Gupta is a visually impaired person and is legally blind. He has a keen interest in reading, writing, and travelling.

As part of the Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellowship, Dr. Gupta is pursuing an LLM at Harvard University. He is studying areas of constitutional and administrative law relating to the balance of powers, balance between regulation and freedom, and trust-based governance. He hopes to be able to apply this knowledge while formulating law and policy in India and to better appreciate the nuances during their implementation. He believes this would enable him to do justice to his profession as an IAS officer in improving the lives of his fellow citizens.

Nikita Agarwal

Ms. Nikita Agarwal is a lawyer, policy practitioner, and community educator. She started out as a policy practitioner in 2013, focusing on addressing the food security crisis and gender-based violence in India, and built her legal practice to bridge the gap between the theoretical and practical applications of law. She has primarily represented indigenous communities in the conflict zone of South Chhattisgarh, and women, children, and religious minorities in Delhi.

Ms. Agarwal was appointed member of the Committee Against Sexual Harassment of the Chhattisgarh Bar Council. She regularly drafts workplace sexual harassment policies and is a gender and sexuality trainer. Through her research and documentation work, she has engaged with issues around labor, conflict, gender and sexuality, forest rights, and the criminalization of the lives of indigenous people and de-notified tribes, among others.

Ms. Agarwal is a graduate of National Law University, Delhi. As a student, she founded the student volunteer group Aaghaaz to provide need-based education to women and children on campus and outside. She simultaneously became involved with the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a people’s anti-displacement resistance movement in Madhya Pradesh, which helped her understand the need to work with law in a holistic manner—synergizing reform processes, litigation, and community mobilizing.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellowship, Ms. Agarwal aims to study the U.S. criminal justice and legal aid systems. After completing her fellowship, Ms. Agarwal intends to build a practice with community lawyers and paralegals, to addresses the crisis of legal aid in India.