VizChitra 2025

India’s legal landscape is filled with ambiguities that can lead to unexpected and often troubling consequences. How do we make sense of these multiple interpretations? More importantly, how do we visualize them to expose the gap between law as written and law as implemented?

In this session, we debut ‘Spectrum’—a data viz tool that deconstructs laws into their component parts and maps each element along a rights-restrictions continuum, creating a visual fingerprint of legislation that reveals its true nature.

Spectrum challenges traditional legal analysis by creating a bridge between “law in the books” and “law in action,” making visible the often-hidden tensions between legislative intent and real-world impact.

Takeaways:

Exploring the idea of legal language as a visual narrative

Reflecting on researcher bias, and challenges in the moral framing of data

Learning how visual frameworks can help deconstruct complex systems

Audience:

This session is designed for an interdisciplinary audience of professionals who already work extensively with data but struggle with effective storytelling. It’s ideal for journalists, lawyers, researchers, designers, and developers who have confidence in their content and research but seek innovative ways to transform their information into compelling, multidimensional narratives. The talk will particularly benefit those in communication and design roles, data analysis, public policy, academia, and tool builders who want to move beyond conventional visualization approaches to reveal deeper patterns and connections in complex social data.

Bio:

Lubhyathi Rangarajan is a Research Fellow at SOAS, University of London committed to a long term project documenting the social life of law in India. She has extensive experience in data-driven legal advocacy. She was a founding member of Project 39A, National Law University Delhi,litigating on behalf of prisoners on death row in India. In 2020, she led the creation of India’s first public database on the use of sedition law at Article-14, which was cited in five Supreme Court petitions challenging the constitutionality of sedition. The database was covered by domestic and international media including The Washington Post, CNN, and BBC. A Forbes India 30 Under 30 honoree for her work in criminal justice, Lubhyathi’s expertise lies in transforming complex legal data into accessible visualizations that drive social change.

Akshay Madan is the founder of Wildfire, a tech collective focused on creating digital frameworks for social justice movements. With 15 years of experience building technology tools for human rights organizations, Akshay’s work lies at the intersection of technology, inequality, and information architecture. He has developed open-source frameworks and non-hierarchical database systems that have been used in over 150 social justice projects across 18 Indian languages. His approach combines technical expertise with a deep commitment to using visualization as a tool for social transformation.