The Covid-19 and the Constitution timeline tracks and visualizes Indian legal and policy responses to the pandemic and contextualizes them with fundamental rights guaranteed in the Indian Constitution. This timeline is built as a resource for not only legal researchers but also journalists and reporters, students, teachers, analysts and civil society in general.
The design of the timeline has three primary goals
1. Enable a chronological reading of the government responses
The timeline visualizes the plethora of legal and policy decisions taken every day since Covid-19 was first identified, represented as grey dots, and uses colour-coded bands to indicate the fundamental rights that they impact. The timeline draws the user’s attention to this tacit relationship between rights and policy.
2. Allow in depth analysis of the nature of these responses
Each decision or response is categorised using multiple criteria such as the constitutional rights affected, origin of response (state judiciaries, government ministries and departments), type of response, areas of impact and impacted jurisdiction (geography). The timeline is designed to allow complex filtering of these categories to help answer questions surrounding the impact of these responses.
3. Humanise the impact through stories and critical expert commentaries
The timeline offers illustrated personal narratives and experiences of citizens’ varied struggles, along with critical commentary on emerging issues that implicate fundamental rights.
Conceptualized and developed in collaboration with Center for Health Equity, Law (C-Help) and Justice Adda.
Resources
Essay about the project published in Sur International Journal on Human Rights