A terse, brief order of the Supreme Court of India in the Networking of
Rivers case in September 2002 impugns the role of public interest litigation in
the wake of neoliberal reforms. At a poignant moment in India's
'tryst with destiny', socio-legal studies in India stand
disarmed and disempowered without adequate conceptual and theoretical tools to
analyse and interpret the event in emancipatory ways. The case inaugurates a new
phase in judicial activism and Public Interest Litigation in India, a subject that
has been written about extensively both in India and elsewhere. In this article the
Networking of Rivers case is used as a vehicle to explore the
trajectories of developments in socio-legal studies in India and the ways in which
it may have contributed to the present theoretical and conceptual impasse. The
article argues for a more geo-historically differentiated understanding of the
theoretical underpinnings of socio-legal studies in India and the 'Third
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