In this episode of the LAOT podcast, Aastha Gupta and Vatsal Golyan speak with Rukmini S (Independent Data Journalist and Author) about Census 2027, India's biggest data collection exercise being carried out after a delay of 15 years and its implications. The conversation looks at what this unprecedented gap means for India’s understanding of its population and how the census shapes the way the state sees and governs the country. It also considers the challenges involved in ensuring that the census remains an accurate and trusted source of public data.

In this episode of the LAOT Podcast, Vivek Jadhav and Hamza Khan speak with Prakruthi Jain, a 2025 NALSAR graduate and petitioner-in-person before the Supreme Court, about her challenge to the Bar Council of India’s circulars regulating law students. The conversation examines the BCI’s mandates requiring CCTV surveillance in classrooms, biometric attendance, and disclosure of criminal antecedents at the stages of admission and issuance of final marksheets and degrees.Together, they unpack the limits of the BCI’s regulatory authority, the constitutional concerns surrounding privacy, arbitrary discretion, and the chilling effect of surveillance, and the implications of making students’ access to legal education contingent on their criminal records. The discussion also explores the broader debate around mandatory attendance, internships, the quality of legal education, and whether students are being unfairly treated as the sole stakeholders responsible for systemic shortcomings in legal education.Finally, Prakruthi reflects on her experience appearing as a petitioner-in-person before the Supreme Court and what her case reveals about the space available to young advocates and students to challenge regulatory action.

In this episode of the LAOT Podcast, Arnav Mathur speaks with Dr. Sidharth Chauhan (Assistant Professor, NLSIU Bangalore) about the persistent neglect of electoral reservations within India's constitutional jurisprudence on affirmative action. The conversation traces why political representation, despite predating and arguably outweighing reservations in education and employment in consequence, has generated only a thin body of case law, and argues that this neglect stems from its exclusion from the fundamental rights chapter and its roots in a colonial logic of consociationalism rather than constitutional social transformation. Together, they examine the doctrinal confusion in the Krishna Murthy judgment, which distinguishes political barriers from socio-economic ones yet still imports the 50% reservation ceiling and creamy layer anxieties from education and employment jurisprudence, and unpack the practical fallout of this contradiction across Telangana, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh. They discuss why subclassification, creamy layer exclusion, and religious conversion bars may be poorly suited to the logic of electoral consolidation, and debate whether breaching the 50% ceiling could, in fact, be the more constitutionally coherent path forward for political representation specifically. Finally, drawing on the legal theory of Niklas Luhmann and Günther Teubner, they reflect on why courts, even when equipped to recognize a domain as conceptually distinct, tend to fall back on borrowed doctrine, and what it would take for adjudication to build a genuinely independent theory of political equality.