Citation
Rajni1*
and Dr Rajendra Sharma2
1Research Scholar
Department of Political Science
Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak,
Haryana, India
Email ID:
rajnisolankirajni@gmail.com
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9255-1947
*Corresponding author
2Department of Political Science
Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak,
Haryana, India
Abstract
Human rights
have become a pervasive vocabulary in Indian legal and social science research,
yet the structure and direction of this expanding literature have rarely been
examined systematically. This review maps 457 Scopus-indexed journal articles
on human rights with at least one Indian institutional affiliation, published
between 2016 and 2026, using performance analysis and science-mapping
techniques. Annual output grew more than five-fold, from 14 articles in 2016 to
75 in 2025 and 82 in 2026, a compound annual growth rate of about 20.5 per
cent. The literature is highly dispersed: the 457 articles appeared in 318
journals, 36 of which account for one-third of the output, and 93 per cent of
the 1,516 authors contributed only one article. Citation impact is modest
(median one citation; 36.3 per cent uncited; dataset h-index 22). Keyword
co-occurrence analysis identifies six principal clusters: constitutional
equality and discrimination; public health, pandemic and surveillance;
artificial intelligence and intellectual property; climate change, displacement
and the rights of nature; data protection and international law; and
sustainable development and consumer protection. Thematic evolution shows a
shift from trade-related intellectual property and health policy in 2016-2020
to COVID-19 and constitutional dignity in 2021-2023, and to artificial
intelligence, data protection and climate change in 2024-2026. In contrast, the
institutions through which rights are enforced receive very little attention:
police, prisons and custody appear in about 2 per cent of articles, caste and
Dalit concerns in 2.2 per cent, and the National Human Rights Commission in
only three articles (0.7 per cent), none of which takes a commission as its
object of study. The review argues that Indian human rights scholarship has
undergone a “technological and regulatory turn” that risks neglecting the
accountability of the coercive state, and proposes a research agenda centred on
enforcement institutions, caste and gender intersections, and data-driven
evaluation.
Keywords: human rights; India; bibliometric analysis; science mapping;
Scopus; thematic evolution; human rights institutions; research agenda
1. Introduction
The language of human rights has travelled far beyond its origins in
international law and constitutional jurisprudence. In India, it now frames
debates on public health, environmental protection, digital privacy,
intellectual property, labour, gender justice and the conduct of the police.
This expansion reflects both the depth of India’s constitutional commitment to
fundamental rights, amplified by the judicial reinterpretation of Article 21
since the late 1970s (Sathe, 2002; Singh, 2023), and the proliferation of
international instruments and domestic statutes that invoke rights-based
reasoning. It also reflects changes in the organisation of academic knowledge
production, including the rapid growth of law schools, the increasing
importance of indexed publication for academic careers, and the
internationalisation of research collaboration.
Despite
this growth, relatively little is known about the overall shape of human rights
scholarship produced from India. Narrative reviews have typically focused on
particular domains, such as judicial activism (Bhuwania, 2017), transgender
rights (Khanna, 2022), or caste-based violence (Verma, Yadav & Sharma,
2026a), rather than on the field as a whole. Bibliometric methods, which
analyse publication, citation and keyword data at scale, offer a complementary
approach. They can reveal how a field has grown, where it is published, who
produces it, what themes dominate and how these themes have changed over time
(Donthu et al., 2021; Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017). Crucially for a normative
field such as human rights, they can also reveal what is absent.
This
review addresses four questions. First, how has the volume and impact of
Scopus-indexed human rights research from India evolved between 2016 and 2026?
Second, how is this research distributed across sources, authors, institutions
and countries? Third, what thematic structures characterise the field, and how
have they changed over time? Fourth, which topics of evident social importance
remain under-researched, and what agenda should future research pursue? In
answering the fourth question, the review pays particular attention to the
institutions through which rights are enforced, notably the National Human
Rights Commission (NHRC), State Human Rights Commissions (SHRCs), the police
and the prison system, which are central to the lived experience of rights in
India but, as the analysis shows, peripheral to its indexed scholarship.
The
paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 situates the study in the literature on
human rights research in India and on bibliometric review. Section 3 describes
the data and methods. Section 4 presents the results. Section 5 discusses their
implications, Section 6 sets out a research agenda, and Section 7 concludes.
2. Background
2.1 The
expansion of rights discourse in India
Indian
human rights scholarship has long been shaped by the country’s constitutional
design and by the activism of its higher judiciary. The foundational texts of
the field, such as Basu’s commentaries on the Constitution, Krishna Iyer’s
(1984) writings on law and human rights, and Baxi’s (1987, 2002) critical
interventions, were rooted in the interpretation of Parts III and IV of the
Constitution and in the experience of public interest litigation. From the late
1970s, the Supreme Court read into Article 21 a growing list of unenumerated
rights, including the rights to live with dignity, to livelihood, to legal aid,
to health, to a clean environment and, in 2017, to privacy. Each of these
doctrinal expansions generated its own sub-literature.
A
second influence has been international. India’s accession to the International
Covenants in 1979, its participation in the Universal Periodic Review, and the
creation of the NHRC in 1993 in the wake of the Vienna World Conference linked
domestic scholarship to global debates (Kumar, 2003; Sripati, 2000). A third
influence has been the social movements of Dalits, women, Adivasis, workers and
sexual minorities, whose claims have been framed increasingly in the vocabulary
of rights (Baxi, 2002; Kannabiran, 2016). More recently, rapid technological
change, the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis have produced new rights
claims and new regulatory questions, from data protection and algorithmic
accountability to climate displacement and the rights of nature.
Two
further features of the Indian context shape the literature. The first is the
growth of legal education. Since the establishment of the first National Law
School in Bengaluru in 1987, more than twenty national law universities and a
large number of private law schools have been created, many of which publish
journals and require faculty publication. The second is the increasing weight
given to indexed publications in academic appointments and promotions, which
has encouraged researchers across disciplines, including medicine, management
and engineering, to publish on legal and ethical questions in journals indexed
by Scopus and the Web of Science. Both developments have expanded the volume of
human rights research, but they may also have influenced its thematic
composition, favouring topics that are internationally legible and amenable to
desk-based analysis.
2.2 Bibliometric review
as a method
Bibliometric
review has become a standard tool for mapping research fields. Performance
analysis measures the productivity and impact of countries, institutions,
sources and authors, while science mapping uses co-citation, bibliographic
coupling and keyword co-occurrence to reveal the intellectual and conceptual
structure of a field (Donthu et al., 2021). Classical bibliometric
regularities, such as Bradford’s law of the scattering of articles across
journals and Lotka’s law of author productivity, provide benchmarks against
which the concentration of a field can be assessed. In the social sciences and
law, bibliometric reviews have been used to map fields such as affirmative
action (Verma, Yadav & Sharma, 2026c), transit-oriented development and
urban planning (Sharma & Dehalwar, 2025), and social injustice in the built
environment (Dehalwar & Sharma, 2024). To the authors’ knowledge, no
comprehensive bibliometric review of human rights research from India has been
published.
3. Data
and Methods
3.1 Data source and retrieval
Bibliographic
data were retrieved from the Scopus database, which offers broad coverage of
peer-reviewed journals in law, the social sciences and related disciplines and
provides structured fields for affiliations, keywords and citations. The
export, dated 30 September 2026, comprised journal articles with the phrase
“human rights” in the title, abstract or keywords, at least one author
affiliated with an Indian institution, and a publication year between 2016 and
2026. All records were in English and all were classified as articles. The
final dataset contained 457 records with 45 fields each, including authors,
affiliations, title, source, year, volume, pages, citations, abstract, author
keywords, index keywords, funding and open-access status. Citation counts
reflect the date of export; articles published in 2025 and 2026 have therefore
had less time to accumulate citations.
3.2 Analytical procedures
The analysis
proceeded in five steps. First, performance indicators were computed, including
annual output, compound annual growth rate, total and mean citations, the
proportion of uncited articles and the h-index of the dataset. Second, the
distribution of articles across sources was examined using Bradford’s zones, in
which sources ranked by productivity are divided into three groups each
contributing about one-third of the articles. Third, author productivity was
compared with Lotka’s inverse-square law, and international collaboration was
measured as the share of articles with at least one non-Indian affiliation.
Fourth, author keywords were normalised to lower case and counted; a
co-occurrence network of the forty most frequent substantive keywords
(excluding the generic terms “human rights”, “India”, “rights” and “law”) was
constructed and partitioned into clusters using the Louvain community-detection
algorithm. Fifth, a dictionary-based thematic screening of titles, abstracts
and keywords was applied to classify articles into thirteen themes, and the
share of articles under each theme was compared across three periods: 2016-2020
(115 articles), 2021-2023 (112 articles) and 2024-2026 (230 articles). An
article could belong to more than one theme. All computations were carried out
in Python using the pandas and networkx libraries. The dictionary-based
classification is intended to estimate broad thematic shares rather than to code
each article precisely; because it relies on the presence of terms, it may
count articles that mention a theme only incidentally, and the records flagged
under the smallest themes (police and custody, caste, and human rights
commissions) were therefore read individually to confirm their substantive
focus.
3.3 Limitations
Three limitations should be
noted. First, Scopus does not index all Indian law journals, and much Indian
human rights scholarship appears in books, edited volumes, non-indexed journals
and reports of civil society organisations; the dataset therefore represents
the indexed, internationally visible segment of the field. Second, the
retrieval strategy captures any article that mentions human rights, including
some in medicine, engineering and environmental science that use the term
incidentally; this produces some peripheral records, which are discussed where
relevant, but it also reflects the genuine diffusion of rights language across
disciplines. Third, author names in Scopus are not fully disambiguated, so
author-level counts should be interpreted with caution.
4. Results
4.1 Growth and impact
Table 1 summarises the
main characteristics of the dataset. The 457 articles were written by 1,516
distinct authors, with an average of 3.65 authors per article. About one-fifth
(21.7 per cent) were single-authored, a proportion higher than in the natural
sciences but typical of law. Open-access articles made up 45.7 per cent of the
dataset, and 13.8 per cent (63 articles) reported external funding.
Table 1: Main
characteristics of the dataset
|
Indicator |
Value |
|
Period |
2016-2026 |
|
Articles |
457 |
|
Sources
(journals) |
318 |
|
Authors |
1,516 |
|
Authors
per article (mean) |
3.65 |
|
Single-authored
articles |
99
(21.7%) |
|
Articles
with international co-authorship |
96
(21.0%) |
|
Open-access
articles |
209
(45.7%) |
|
Articles
reporting funding |
63
(13.8%) |
|
Distinct
author keywords |
1,855 |
|
Total
citations |
3,454 |
|
Mean
/ median citations per article |
7.56
/ 1 |
|
Uncited
articles |
166
(36.3%) |
|
h-index |
22 |
|
Compound
annual growth rate, 2016-2025 |
20.5% |
Source: Authors’ computation from Scopus data.
Figure 1 shows the annual output and mean
citations per article. Output rose slowly from 14 articles in 2016 to 34 in
2020, dipped to 24 in 2021, and then accelerated sharply to 53 in 2023, 73 in
2024, 75 in 2025 and 82 in 2026. Half of all articles in the dataset (230 of
457) were published in the three years 2024-2026. Mean citations per article
peaked for the 2023 cohort (19.4), largely because of a single highly cited
multi-author article in Nature, and declined for recent cohorts as expected
given the shorter citation window. Articles from 2016-2020 averaged 11.4
citations and those from 2021-2023 averaged 14.0, but the median in both
periods was only four, indicating a highly skewed distribution in which a few
articles attract most citations.
Figure 1: Annual output
(upper panel) and mean citations per article (lower panel), 2016-2026
4.2 Sources and Bradford’s law
The literature
is widely dispersed across journals. The 457 articles appeared in 318 sources,
of which the most productive were the Indian Journal of Law and Justice (21
articles), the Journal of Intellectual Property Rights (19), the Journal of
Human Rights and Social Work (10), the Indian Journal of Public Health Research
and Development (7) and the International Journal on Minority and Group Rights
(6). Application of Bradford’s law (Figure 2) shows that a core of 36 sources
accounts for the first third of articles, a second zone of 130 sources for the
next third, and a third zone of 152 sources, each contributing a single
article, for the final third. The ratio of zone sizes (36 : 130 : 152) departs
from the geometric progression predicted by Bradford’s law in the third zone,
reflecting the large number of journals outside law and the social sciences
that published a single human rights article. The prominence of an Indian law
school journal and of a specialised intellectual property journal at the head of
the distribution indicates the influence of domestic legal publishing and of
the intellectual property field on the indexed literature.
Figure 2:
Bradford’s zones of source productivity
Table 2 lists the leading sources.
Table 2:
Leading sources of human rights research from India, 2016-2026
|
Source |
Articles |
Discipline |
|
Indian Journal of Law and
Justice |
21 |
Law |
|
Journal of Intellectual
Property Rights |
19 |
Intellectual property law |
|
Journal of Human Rights and
Social Work |
10 |
Social work |
|
Indian Journal of Public
Health Research and Development |
7 |
Public health |
|
International Journal on
Minority and Group Rights |
6 |
International law |
|
International Journal of
Drug Delivery Technology |
5 |
Pharmacy (peripheral) |
|
International Journal of
Scientific and Technology Research |
5 |
Multidisciplinary |
|
International Journal of
Human Rights |
4 |
Human rights |
|
Economic and Political
Weekly |
4 |
Social science |
|
Journal of Environmental
Management |
4 |
Environmental science |
|
Asia Pacific Journal of
Environmental Law |
4 |
Environmental law |
|
Indian Pediatrics |
4 |
Medicine |
Source: Authors’ computation from Scopus data.
4.3 Authors,
institutions and collaboration
Author
productivity is extremely dispersed. Of 1,516 authors, 1,411 (93.1 per cent)
contributed a single article, 82 (5.4 per cent) contributed two, 13 contributed
three and 7 contributed four; only three author names appear six or more times,
and some of these reflect common surnames that Scopus has not fully
disambiguated. As Figure 3 shows, the share of authors with more than one
article falls much faster than Lotka’s inverse-square law predicts. The field
is therefore characterised by a large periphery of occasional contributors and
a very small core of repeat authors, a pattern consistent with a domain that
many researchers enter from other disciplines but few pursue as a sustained
specialism.
Figure
3: Author productivity compared with Lotka’s law
At the institutional
level, the most frequent affiliations include O.P. Jindal Global University’s
law school (18 articles), the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (17), the
University of Delhi (12), Gujarat National Law University (8), Aligarh Muslim
University (7) and Symbiosis Law School (6). The combination of private and
national law schools with a leading medical institution again underlines the
dual legal and health orientation of the field. International collaboration,
measured by the presence of at least one non-Indian affiliation, occurred in 96
articles (21.0 per cent). The most frequent partner countries were the United
States (37 articles), the United Kingdom (29), South Africa (16), Germany (13),
Australia (12) and Canada (11). Collaboration with other South Asian countries
was limited, with Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal together appearing
in fewer than fifteen articles, despite shared legal traditions and common
human rights concerns.
4.4 Conceptual
structure: keyword clusters
The
dataset contains 1,855 distinct author keywords. After the generic terms, the
most frequent were “artificial intelligence” (17), “COVID-19” (12),
“intellectual property rights” (11), “discrimination” and “climate change” (8
each), “copyright”, “intellectual property” and “law” (7 each), and “data
protection”, “transgender”, “right to health”, “consumer protection”,
“sustainable development goals”, “child sexual abuse”, “human trafficking”,
“privacy” and “United Nations” (5 or 6 each). The co-occurrence network of the
forty most frequent substantive keywords is shown in Figure 4, and the clusters
identified by the Louvain algorithm are summarised in Table 3.
Figure
4: Keyword co-occurrence network coloured by Louvain cluster (largest connected
component)
Table
3: Thematic clusters identified by keyword co-occurrence
|
Cluster |
Principal keywords (in order of frequency) |
Interpretation |
|
1 |
discrimination,
transgender, constitution, awareness, consent, consumer protection act,
jurisprudence |
Constitutional equality,
identity and consent |
|
2 |
COVID-19, intellectual
property rights, human trafficking, privacy, legislation, TRIPS, surveillance |
Pandemic governance, access
to medicines and surveillance |
|
3 |
artificial intelligence,
intellectual property, copyright, ethics, machine learning, patent |
Technology, AI ethics and
intellectual property |
|
4 |
climate change, South Asia,
gender, rights of nature, displacement |
Climate justice,
displacement and ecological rights |
|
5 |
data protection, United
Nations, right to health, right to privacy, international humanitarian law |
International law, privacy
and health |
|
6 |
consumer protection,
sustainable development goals, human rights law, gender equality, health
policy |
Development, SDGs and
consumer rights |
|
Minor |
adolescents, child sexual
abuse, children, development, environment |
Child rights (weakly
connected) |
Source: Authors’ computation; Louvain community detection on keyword
co-occurrence.
Three features of the
conceptual structure deserve comment. First, artificial intelligence is the
most central substantive node, linked to intellectual property, data
protection, climate change, ethics and sustainable development. Second,
constitutional themes (Cluster 1) form a distinct but relatively peripheral
cluster organised around discrimination and transgender rights, reflecting the
influence of the Supreme Court’s decisions in NALSA (2014) and Navtej Singh
Johar (2018). Third, the child rights cluster is only weakly connected to the
rest of the network, suggesting that research on children’s rights, including
child sexual abuse, is conducted largely in isolation from broader human rights
debates.
4.5 Thematic evolution
Table 4 and Figure 5
present the share of articles in each period that address each of thirteen
themes. Health is the largest theme throughout, but its share declined from
36.5 per cent in 2016-2020 to 27.0 per cent in 2024-2026. The share of articles
on technology, artificial intelligence and privacy nearly doubled, from 12.2 to
23.0 per cent, and that on environment and climate rose from 14.8 to 23.0 per
cent. Women and gender more than doubled, from 9.6 to 19.6 per cent, as did
constitutionalism (7.8 to 17.8 per cent), while labour rose from 3.5 to 11.3
per cent. Intellectual property followed a U-shaped trajectory, falling from
18.3 per cent in 2016-2020, when debates about the TRIPS Agreement and access
to medicines were prominent, to 8.9 per cent in 2021-2023, before rising again
to 14.8 per cent with the emergence of copyright and patent questions about
artificial intelligence.
Table 4: Thematic
evolution of human rights research from India (percentage of articles in each
period)
|
Theme |
2016-2020 |
2021-2023 |
2024-2026 |
Total articles |
Median
citations |
|
Health |
36.5 |
29.5 |
27.0 |
137 |
2.0 |
|
Environment and climate |
14.8 |
24.1 |
23.0 |
97 |
1.0 |
|
Women and gender |
9.6 |
21.4 |
19.6 |
80 |
1.0 |
|
Technology, AI and privacy |
12.2 |
14.3 |
23.0 |
83 |
1.0 |
|
Constitutionalism |
7.8 |
14.3 |
17.8 |
66 |
1.0 |
|
Intellectual property |
18.3 |
8.9 |
14.8 |
65 |
1.0 |
|
Judiciary |
7.8 |
16.1 |
14.8 |
61 |
1.0 |
|
Labour |
3.5 |
9.8 |
11.3 |
41 |
1.0 |
|
Children |
11.3 |
13.4 |
12.6 |
57 |
1.0 |
|
Refugees and migration |
2.6 |
7.1 |
9.6 |
33 |
1.0 |
|
Caste and Dalits |
1.7 |
0.9 |
3.0 |
10 |
1.0 |
|
Police, prisons and custody |
2.6 |
2.7 |
1.7 |
10 |
1.0 |
|
Human rights institutions (NHRC/SHRCs) |
0.9 |
0.0 |
0.9 |
3 |
1.0 |
Source: Authors’ computation. Articles may belong to more than one theme;
percentages do not sum to 100.
Figure 5: Thematic
evolution heat map (percentage of articles in each period addressing each
theme)
The keywords that dominated each period
illustrate these shifts. In 2016-2020, the leading substantive keywords were
“intellectual property rights”, “TRIPS”, “copyright”, “Doha Declaration”,
“WTO”, “consumer protection act” and “health policy”, reflecting the aftermath
of India’s patent law amendments and global debates on access to medicines. In
2021-2023, “COVID-19” dominated, followed by “constitution”, “artificial
intelligence”, “jurisprudence”, “discrimination”, “transgender” and “human
dignity”. In 2024-2026, “artificial intelligence” became by far the most
frequent keyword (13 occurrences), followed by “climate change”, “intellectual
property rights”, “data protection”, “displacement”, “machine learning”,
“privacy” and “right to privacy”. The field has thus moved from trade-related
health rights, through the pandemic and constitutional dignity, to a
technological and ecological agenda.
4.6 Influential articles
Citation impact is
concentrated in a small number of articles, several of which lie at the
periphery of human rights scholarship narrowly understood. The most cited
record is a multi-author article in Nature on the diverse values of nature for
sustainability (Pascual et al., 2023; 675 citations), followed by work on
global forest restoration and local communities (Erbaugh et al., 2020; 266
citations). Within the core of the field, frequently cited articles include
analyses of the Ayushman Bharat programme and universal health coverage
(Lahariya, 2018; 173 citations), children’s digital opportunities (Livingstone
et al., 2017; 58 citations), algorithmic transparency (Chaudhary, 2024; 63
citations) and artificial intelligence and human rights from an Indian legal
perspective (Chatterjee & N.S., 2022; 29 citations). Articles on caste,
policing and custody are cited modestly. This pattern suggests that the most
visible human rights research from India is interdisciplinary and globally
networked, whereas research on domestic enforcement institutions has little
international visibility.
4.7 Blind spots:
enforcement institutions, caste and custody
The
most striking finding of the thematic analysis concerns what is missing. Only
ten articles (2.2 per cent) address the police, prisons or custody, and one of
these (on vehicle-accident alert systems) mentions the police only
incidentally; ten (2.2 per cent) address caste or Dalits, several of them
incidentally; and only three (0.7 per cent) mention the National Human Rights
Commission. On closer reading, none of these three articles takes the NHRC or
an SHRC as its object of analysis; the Commission is mentioned only in passing,
for example as the source of an advisory on persons engaged in begging or in
the context of silicosis among sandstone mine workers. Articles referring to
the UN Human Rights Council, which a naive keyword search would also capture,
were excluded from this count. The share of police, prison and custody research
actually declined in the most recent period, from 2.6 to 1.7 per cent, even as
overall output doubled.
These gaps are
difficult to reconcile with the empirical salience of the issues concerned. The
NHRC alone registered between about 75,000 and 1,10,000 cases a year between
2015-16 and 2023-24, processed more than 2,900 cases of custodial death in
2023-24 alone, and has had its international accreditation deferred twice (in
2023 and 2024). The National Crime Records Bureau recorded 57,789 crimes
against Scheduled Castes in 2023, and more than 4.48 lakh crimes against women
(NCRB, 2025). State Human Rights Commissions collectively received more than
one lakh complaints in 2020-21 with a staff vacancy rate of 44.3 per cent (Tata
Trusts, 2023). Scholarship on caste violence has recently begun to use such data
(Verma, Yadav & Sharma, 2026a, 2026b), but the institutions through which
victims might seek redress remain almost entirely absent from indexed research.
5. Discussion
5.1 A technological
and regulatory turn
The
results document what may be called a technological and regulatory turn in
Indian human rights scholarship. The most dynamic themes of the last three
years, namely artificial intelligence, data protection, privacy and
intellectual property, are concerned with the regulation of new technologies
and markets. Several factors explain this turn: the Supreme Court’s recognition
of privacy as a fundamental right in 2017, the enactment of the Digital
Personal Data Protection Act in 2023, the global salience of artificial
intelligence governance, and the attractiveness of technology-related topics
for international journals and collaborators. This scholarship is valuable, and
its growth reflects real changes in the conditions under which rights are
exercised. But its dominance also shifts the centre of gravity of the field
away from the relationship between the individual and the coercive state, which
was the original concern of human rights law and remains the source of the
gravest violations in India.
5.2 The health-environment
axis
Health has
been the single largest theme throughout the period, and environment and
climate have become the second. Both reflect the incorporation of
socio-economic and ecological concerns into the rights framework, consistent
with the judicial expansion of Article 21 and with the global emphasis on the
right to health and on climate justice. The strong representation of medical
institutions and journals in the dataset shows that rights language has become
part of public health and bioethics discourse. At the same time, the median
citation counts for these themes are low, suggesting that much of this work
reaches a limited audience.
5.3 The neglect
of enforcement institutions
The
near-absence of research on human rights commissions, police accountability and
custodial justice is the most consequential gap revealed by this review. The
international literature on National Human Rights Institutions has shown that
their effectiveness depends on institutional design, independence and political
context (Cardenas, 2014; Goodman & Pegram, 2012; Linos & Pegram, 2017),
and early Indian studies raised serious concerns about the structural
constraints on the NHRC (Sripati, 2000; Kumar, 2003). Yet these concerns have
not been followed up in indexed research in the last decade, even as new data
have become available through annual reports, parliamentary replies and the
India Justice Report. The reasons may include the difficulty of obtaining
institutional data, the preference of law journals for doctrinal rather than
empirical work, and the lower international appeal of domestic institutional
studies. Whatever the causes, the consequence is that the institutions most
directly responsible for remedying violations are the least studied.
5.4
Fragmentation and the structure of the field
The
dispersion of articles across 318 journals and the extremely low proportion of
repeat authors indicate a fragmented field with a weak core. Human rights is
treated by many researchers as a frame to be applied to a topic within another
discipline rather than as a field of sustained inquiry. This has advantages,
such as interdisciplinarity and wide diffusion of rights reasoning, but it also
has costs: few researchers accumulate expertise over time, there are few
specialised Indian journals with international visibility, and cumulative
research programmes on specific institutions or violations are rare. The
limited collaboration with South Asian neighbours is also notable, since
comparative regional research on national human rights institutions, caste and
custodial violence would be particularly productive.
5.5 Implications
for research institutions, journals and funders
The
patterns documented here have practical implications for the actors who shape
the production of knowledge. For universities and law schools, the dominance of
single-publication authors suggests a need for sustained research programmes,
doctoral supervision and research centres that allow scholars to build
expertise on specific human rights institutions and violations over time,
rather than moving from topic to topic in response to publication incentives.
Clinical legal education programmes, which bring students into contact with
prisons, police stations and legal aid services, could provide a natural bridge
between teaching and empirical research on enforcement institutions.
For
journals, particularly the Indian law journals that now anchor the core of the
field, the findings suggest value in commissioning special issues or symposia
on human rights commissions, custodial justice and the implementation of the
Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, and
in encouraging empirical submissions that combine doctrinal analysis with
administrative data. For funders, only 13.8 per cent of articles in the dataset
reported external funding, and most funded articles lie in health and environmental
science. Dedicated funding for empirical research on rights institutions,
including support for data collection through the Right to Information Act and
for fieldwork in districts with high incidence of violations, would help to
redress the imbalance.
Finally,
the findings have implications for human rights institutions themselves. The
NHRC and SHRCs are statutorily mandated to encourage research in the field of
human rights, and the NHRC funds research projects and publishes a journal.
Opening institutional data in standardised, machine-readable formats, and
inviting independent evaluation of institutional performance, would enable the
kind of empirical research that this review finds lacking, and would in turn
strengthen the legitimacy of the institutions.
6.
Research Agenda
On the basis of these findings, Table 5 proposes a research agenda
organised around six priorities.
Table 5: A research agenda for human rights scholarship in India
|
Priority |
Research questions |
Suggested data and methods |
|
Enforcement
institutions |
How effective
are the NHRC and SHRCs in securing remedies? What explains variation across
states? |
Annual reports,
RTI data, India Justice Report; comparative case studies; panel analysis |
|
Police and
custodial accountability |
Why do custodial
deaths and encounter killings rarely lead to prosecution? How do oversight
bodies interact? |
NHRC and NCRB
data; court records; interviews with officials and families |
|
Caste and gender
intersections |
How do Dalit
women experience access to justice? Why are atrocity cases frequently closed
as “false”? |
NCRB data;
case-file analysis; qualitative fieldwork |
|
Data and
transparency |
What data do
rights institutions publish, and how can they be standardised? |
Audits of
institutional reporting; development of indicator frameworks |
|
Technology and
the state |
How are AI and
surveillance technologies used by the police and administration, and with
what safeguards? |
Policy analysis;
procurement records; algorithmic audits |
|
Regional
comparison |
How do Indian
institutions compare with those of other South Asian states? |
Comparative
legal and institutional analysis; GANHRI accreditation reports |
Source: Proposed by the authors.
Methodologically, the agenda calls for a shift from purely doctrinal
analysis towards mixed methods that combine legal analysis with administrative
data, field research and comparative designs. It also calls for greater
attention to open data: human rights institutions in India publish much
information, but in formats and at intervals that make systematic analysis
difficult.
7. Conclusion
This
review has mapped a decade of Scopus-indexed human rights research from India.
The field has grown rapidly and diversified thematically, moving from
trade-related health rights through the pandemic and constitutional dignity to
a technological and ecological agenda. It is highly dispersed across journals
and authors, modestly cited and only partly internationalised. Its most
significant blind spot is the institutional machinery of rights enforcement:
human rights commissions, the police and the prison system, together with the
caste and gender hierarchies that shape who suffers violations. Addressing this
gap would reconnect Indian human rights scholarship with the concerns that
first animated it and with the experiences of those whose rights are most at
risk. Future bibliometric work could extend this analysis to other databases,
incorporate co-citation analysis to map the intellectual foundations of the
field, and track whether the gaps identified here begin to close.
Declarations
Funding: No external funding was received. Conflict of interest: The
authors declare no conflict of interest. Data availability: The
bibliographic dataset was exported from Scopus and is available from the
corresponding author on reasonable request, subject to Scopus terms of use.
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