Meet Usha.
Usha Ramanathan is a legal scholar and public intellectual whose work sits at the intersection of law, poverty, rights, and institutional power. Her scholarship interrogates the nature of law and its lived consequences, spanning issues such as the Bhopal Gas Disaster, mass displacement, eminent domain, manual scavenging, civil liberties, the death penalty, criminal law, custodial institutions, environmental justice, and the judicial process. Over the years, she has written and spoken extensively on how legal systems shape and often constrain the human conditions of freedom and liberty.
A significant strand of her work has focused on the Indian national identity project, which she has tracked, critiqued, and engaged with through sustained research, public writing, and debate. More recently, her work has expanded to examine the implications of technology on rights, dignity, and democratic accountability, consistently grounding abstract legal questions in their social and ethical impact.
Her work also includes teaching and contributions to expert committees on privacy, biotechnology and the circumstances of tribal communities. In 2019, Access Now recognised her with its Human Rights Heroes Award.