event

Land Litigation in India: Learnings from a Study on Land Litigation in Delhi

Fri. September 24th, 2021
Zoom Webinar

Land litigation is a serious concern in India. It is estimated that – more than two-thirds of litigations are related to land or property. This has a bearing on a rapidly developing economy like India since land is a factor of production.

In a new working paper, Devendra Damle and Karan Gulati present results of their study on land-related litigation in the Delhi High Court. The study tests the prevalent hypotheses regarding land-litigation in India: that it forms a large proportion of the caseload of Indian courts. Second, that the quality of property records is to blame for the large volume and length of the litigation. Finally, that this high volume of cases is because of the complexity created by the multitude of laws that govern land and property. In order to do so, the authors present a novel data-set of case-level data from the Delhi High Court.

On September 24, Carnegie India hosted a webinar on ‘Land and Property Litigation in India: Learnings from a study on land litigation in Delhi.’ Devendra Damle and Karan Gulati presented and discussed their study and its findings, followed by brief remarks by Kshitij Batra and Namita Wahi. The seminar concluded with an open discussion and was moderated by Anirudh Burman.

RELATED CONTENT

1. Devendra Damle and Karan Gulati, Characterising land and property related litigation at the Delhi High Court, August 26, 2021, NIPFP Working Paper Series

2. Anirudh Burman, India has to attack causes of land litigation. Modi’s Ease of Doing Business depends on it, July 1, 2019, ThePrint

3. Namita Wahi, Indian courts clogged with land disputes because laws keep conflicting each other, June 26, 2019, ThePrint

Domestic PoliticsSouth AsiaIndia
event speakers

Anirudh Burman

Associate Research Director and Fellow, Carnegie India

Anirudh Burman is an associate research director and fellow at Carnegie India. He works on key issues relating to public institutions, public administration, the administrative and regulatory state, and state capacity.

Devendra Damle

Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC)

Devendra Damle is the vice president for policy at Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) where he leads the organization's public policy, compliance, and government engagement functions.

Karan Gulati

Karan Gulati is a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy. He is a lawyer by training. His research interests include judicial administration and property rights.

Kshitij Batra

Kshitij Batra is the Co-Founder and CEO of TEAL (Terra Economics and Analytics Lab), a technology startup digitizing land and property data in India. He previously served as Additional Private Secretary to a Union Cabinet Minister to advise on policy and data. He was a Junior Fellow at the IDFC Institute, where he led projects on housing, urbanisation and geospatial analytics. Kshitij has also worked with Housing.com as a Senior Economist, with the World Bank's Global Urban team in Washington DC and Africa, the MIT Jameel Poverty Action Lab and NERA Economic Consulting in New York. He holds his Masters in Public Administration & International Development from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Namita Wahi

Namita Wahi is a Fellow at CPR, where she leads the Land Rights Initiative, and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Law and Social Transformation in Bergen. Namita’s research interests are broadly in the areas of property rights, social and economic rights, and eminent domain or expropriation law. Previously, Namita was a litigator with Davis Polk and Wardwell in New York, where she practised primarily in the areas of bankruptcy, securities, criminal defence and asylum law. She was recently awarded the New India Fellowship for her forthcoming book on the history of the Fundamental Right to Property in the Indian Constitution.