A Constitution full of rights, and almost no one who understood them
Kanan Dhru grew up in a traditional Gujarati family in Ahmedabad, where her forefathers had helped start the Gujarat Law Society. Her Gandhian-principles school placed her, every day, in the middle of glaring inequality: children of farmers and daily-wage workers sitting beside children from comfortable homes. She didn’t have a name for it then, but she knew she wanted to understand where the unfairness came from, and who was supposed to fix it.
That question took her to the London School of Economics to study law, and then back to India, where she worked inside the Prime Minister’s advisory body, wrote legislation with Members of Parliament, and finally stepped into a courtroom as a young advocate at the Gujarat High Court. As a young lawyer, she won a case for a bus conductor who had lost his leg to his employer’s negligence, fighting for a claim of just ₹14,000. The judgment arrived years after he had passed away.
The law cannot only be right. It has to be reachable, and it has to arrive in time.
— Kanan Dhru, Founder
That conviction led her to found the Research Foundation for Governance in India (RFGI) on 26 January 2009, which grew into a network of over 3,000 lawyers, students, academics, and journalists working on access to justice and governance. Lawtoons began as one of RFGI’s ideas, and has since grown into an identity, and a mission, of its own.
With her younger sister Kelly, then a law student, Kanan asked a simple question: what if the law was taught the way children actually learn, through story, character, and humour, not statute? That question became Pugloo, a curious young boy, and Judgni, a witty judge who lives inside a magical Constitution. Graphics are one of the oldest forms of storytelling known to human civilization, and Lawtoons uses that same power to make laws and rights easier to understand, and genuinely enjoyable to read.