At a glance
- Competitions
- Five
- Prizes
- Up to ₹1,00,000
- Duration
- Two days, Jabalpur
- Open to
- Students, research scholars, academicians and advocates, depending on the competition
About the conclave
NyayaTech combines nyaya (justice) and technology. The conclave examines how courts, lawyers and citizens increasingly depend on digital systems to resolve disputes and access legal support, and asks whether a digital justice system delivers not only speed but access, inclusion and fairness. It covers legal aid, public interest litigation, dispute resolution and community access to legal services.
Alongside the competitions, the conclave includes a Round Table Conference, an Expert Panel Discussion, and the release of an Outcomes Report.
The five competitions
App Development Competition
“Technology for Accessible Legal Aid and Digital Justice”
Concept directions include mobile legal aid helpdesks for rural citizens, chat-based legal guidance, platforms connecting lawyers with beneficiaries, e-complaint and grievance tracking, ODR support, and accessibility tools with language-friendly or voice-supported interfaces.
A working prototype or demo is required — purely theoretical entries are not accepted. AI and low-code tools are expressly permitted for this competition.
- Who can enter
- Individual, two members, or three members
- Prize
- ₹1,00,000 winner
₹50,000 runner-up - Preliminary fee
- ₹3,000
Lok Adalat Simulation
Scored on conciliation rather than adversarial argument.
- Who can enter
- Teams of exactly three — neutral panel member, counsel and client
- Prize
- ₹30,000 winner
₹20,000 runner-up - Preliminary fee
- ₹1,500
Paper Presentation Competition
“Building an Inclusive Digital Justice System for New India”
Indicative sub-themes: e-courts and access to justice; the digital divide in justice delivery; online dispute resolution; cyber law, privacy and data protection in judicial systems; AI in courts; technology-driven legal aid; PIL in the digital age; legal tech start-ups.
Selected papers will be published in an ISBN volume, NYAYA: A Legal Aid Review, Volume I — Digital Justice and Inclusion.
- Who can enter
- Academicians, advocates, research scholars and students. Maximum two authors
- Prize
- ₹20,000 winner
₹10,000 runner-up - Preliminary fee
- ₹1,000
PIL Drafting Competition
A single-round submission of a complete public interest litigation draft. Assessed on legal research, drafting quality, understanding of PIL jurisprudence, the public interest element, the structure of reliefs, and constitutional soundness.
- Who can enter
- Individual or two co-authors
- Prize
- ₹20,000 winner
₹10,000 runner-up - Preliminary fee
- ₹1,000
Socio-Legal Challenge
Teams identify a real socio-legal problem within 250 km of their institution, conduct empirical research on it, and design a practical intervention with a digital component that a legal aid clinic could realistically adopt.
- Who can enter
- Two presenters; the wider research team may include up to two senior and ten junior researchers
- Prize
- ₹20,000 winner
₹10,000 runner-up - Preliminary fee
- ₹1,500
The two released problem statements
PIL Drafting — unregulated facial recognition and biometric surveillance
Not a hypothetical. The problem is built on live litigation: an Article 32 petition before the Supreme Court concerning police use of facial recognition and biometric surveillance at protest sites, set against the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022, which does not mention facial recognition at all, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, whose law-enforcement exemptions leave police use of biometric data largely outside its consent and purpose-limitation safeguards.
Participants are expressly barred from reproducing the pending petition's prayers and must identify relief the Court has not already been asked for.
Lok Adalat Simulation — denial of food security entitlement through biometric authentication failure
A 61-year-old widow in a village in Jabalpur district, holding an Antyodaya Anna Yojana ration card, is denied four consecutive months of subsidised food grain because decades of manual agricultural labour have worn her fingerprints too faint to authenticate on the fair price shop's ePoS terminal. The dealer says he was never trained on the alternate authentication route.
The exercise is conciliation between the beneficiary, the dealer and the district supply authority — not litigation.
Both problems are worth reading even by those not entering. They are the clearest short statement anyone has written this year of what digital justice fails at.
Project NyayaBodh
Alongside the competitions, VidhiMitra is building a legal-literacy handbook explaining everyday law, rights and remedies for the common person, in English and Hindi. Contributions are invited free of cost — 150–200 words on a single prescribed topic. Selected contributors are acknowledged by name, and the handbook is released at the conclave.
- Contribution fee
- NIL
- Word limit
- 150–200 words
- Deadline
- 5 October 2026
Read the call and the prescribed topicsPartner
Advocado is the Official Outreach Partner for NYAYATECH 2026. We are not entering any of the competitions.
The NYAYATECH 2026 Participant Resource Hub — a free research companion covering the statutory framework, case law and policy material behind each competition track — is in preparation.