Civics textbooks are passe; School kids can now learn the law through comics

Kanan and Kelly Dhru still have the wide-eyed enthusiasm characteristic of fresher law students. The sisters are on a mission to foster a new generation of kids who will grow up to be socially responsible adults aware of the laws that govern them. To this end, they plan to release a series of comic books called ‘Lawtoons’..The first volume, which was released earlier this month, is titled “A Song for Everyone” and deals with topics like the Right to Equality and Freedom of Expression. The initiative has been successfully crowd-funded, with a total of 2.75 lakhs being raised for the first volume alone..Kanan and Kelly, law graduates from the London School of Economics and Gujarat National Law University respectively, have been actively pushing for legal reforms through their organization, Research Foundation for Governance in India (RFGI) since 2009..In an e-mail interview with Bar & Bench, Kanan Dhru gave us some insights into the Lawtoons project..On the inspiration behind Lawtoons.Since childhood, I was fascinated with the idea of justice and believed that it is important for people to understand their laws. I studied law in the UK and was exposed to a very efficient justice delivery system. However, when I started practicing in the High Court in India, I realised that our legal system needed massive reforms. It takes almost 20 to 25 years to solve a case and most people do not even know the system works. To address issues like this, I started RFGI.Through RFGI, my sister Kelly and I organised public debates, conducted research on the legal system and worked with schools to raise awareness among kids about their rights and the laws. The civics curriculum in most schools is such that most kids perceive it as dull and boring and unfortunately, this results in a society which is unaware of the basic law of the land. The presentations were so popular and interactive that schools wanted us to keep coming back. We realised that we could reach only a handful of schools and needed to reach out to a much wider audience. We decided to create a compendium but did not want to make it too preachy or boring.Then the idea of creating a cartoon book on law came about at a meeting of the Ahmedabad Global Shapers, a community of the World Economic Forum, of which I am a member. Kelly and I decided to take the idea forward and make it a reality.. On how the crowd-funding turned out to be a success.When we met the National Institute of Design (NID) director with the prototype, he got very excited about the idea and showed willingness to partner in the process. However, we did not have the fees to pay the NID artists. Thus, we decided to start a crowdfunding campaign. It was a very new idea and we were taking a big risk with it. However, it was a very successful campaign and gave us the funding to start working on the first volume.It was successful because I guess the idea was very powerful – people see the need to make laws more simple and accessible. We reached out to different kinds of audiences and since we had a lot of fun working on the process, it reflected in our campaign also..On plans for the future .I very strongly believe that we need to completely change the way we frame, communicate and implement laws in our country. There are so many laws in our country and so much can be done in terms of making them simple and accessible for everyone. We are really excited to continue to work on this initiative further in future. We are exploring the idea of making an interactive mobile application as well as translating the book in local language to reach out to the masses.At the moment, we are planning to work on at least 6 to 8 different volumes exclusively on fundamental rights and then taking them to schools.We hope that we continue to generate funds to keep working on this idea!