Collective Submissions to the Jane Kaushik Committee
On August 24, 2026, the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy and the Keshav Suri Foundation convened a closed-door panel and workshop at The LaLit, New Delhi, bringing together transgender and intersex community members, civil society organisations, lawyers, academics and healthcare professionals to deliberate on the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026 (‘Amendment Act’). The discussion was guided by the themes in Vidhi’s report, ‘The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026: What Can State Governments Do?’ and its accompanying advocacy toolkit.
The inputs that emerged have been consolidated into a collective submission to the Advisory Committee chaired by Justice Asha Menon, constituted by the Supreme Court in Jane Kaushik v. Union of India (2025). The submission is made jointly by a collective that lent their names to the consultations.
To protect the privacy of the organisations and individuals these names have been redacted in the submission attached.
The submission records the on-ground impact of the Amendment Act as reported by stakeholders across five themes: (a) lived experience as evidence, (b) self-identification and gender identity, (c) healthcare and privacy, (d) impact of the new offences, and (e) dialogue between the State and the community.
Key concerns include:
- the conflation of intersex status with transgender identity, and the erasure of transgender men, non-binary and genderqueer persons from the narrowed definition,
- the suspension of transgender identity card applications, and the card being treated as a proxy for identity by police and institutions,
- delay and discontinuation of gender-affirming and routine healthcare despite the untouched duty to provide discrimination free healthcare under Section 15 of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019,
- a data-sharing mandate with no prescribed format, purpose or safeguards which risks the right to privacy of transgender persons, in contrast to existing health reporting regimes, and
- vague new offences that conflate legitimate medical care with criminal harm and are already being invoked against civil society organisations and transgender families.
**We would like to thank Ishanika Sharma and Tooba Shahid, who interned at Vidhi, for their valuable assistance with this project.
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About the Authors
Pragya is a Senior Resident Fellow at Vidhi, where she has worked for four years in the area of Legal Design and Regulation. Prior to this, she was a Legal Assistant at the Law and Legislative Department, Government of Chhattisgarh, focusing on regulatory compliance and drafting of State rules and statutes, along with policy research and government contracts. Pragya holds a B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) from Hidayatullah National Law University (2018) and an LL.M. in Constitutional Law from National Law University Odisha (2020). Her research interests include regulatory design, post-colonial feminist studies, and trade law. She is an avid reader with a love for dystopian and fantasy literature.
Palomi Chaturvedi joined the Research Director’s Office at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy after graduating from Jindal Global Law School in 2025. Her academic and research interests cover arbitration, jurisprudence and tax law, as well as rigorous ethical inquiry to inform public policy and social outcomes. She believes in applying evidence-based approaches to guide impactful legal reforms and social change; her approach to ethics draws on consequentialist ideas. Beyond her professional interests, She is an avid strength trainer who enjoys outdoor activities like trekking, alongside a fascination for psychological and horror cinema.
Jwalika is a Senior Resident Fellow in the Research Director's Office at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, Delhi. She holds a Bachelor of Civil Law (LLM-equivalent) degree from the University of Oxford and a BA LLB (Hons) from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. Her areas of interest include family law, equality and anti-discrimination law, and human rights, with a special emphasis on gender and sexuality. She is on the Board of Directors at OutLawed India, a not-for-profit organisation working to improve access to law and justice. At Vidhi, she has been providing legislative drafting assistance to various Ministries, Departments, and Authorities of the Central Government and various State Governments.
Namrata is a Senior Resident Fellow in the Legal Design and Regulation Vertical at Vidhi. She primarily handles engaged and commissioned projects from various ministries, statutory authorities and regulators by providing legal research and legislative drafting support. At Vidhi, she has worked with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Women and Child Development and the Department of Consumer Affairs. Namrata also works extensively on queer rights and has initiated and worked on numerous projects on rights of gender and sexual minorities. She has written for the Hindu, the Firstpost, the Economic Times, the Leaflet, Article 14, Indian Express and Varta GenSex Policy Matters. Prior to Vidhi, Namrata taught at the Jindal Global Law School and the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (‘NUJS’), worked with the Migration and Asylum Project on labour laws and policy, the Centre for Popular Democracy in New York City, and the Public Law and Vidhi Aid verticals at Vidhi. She has a BA/LLB from NUJS and a LLM from Columbia Law which she attended in the capacity of a Human Rights Fellow
