Sick of engaging from the sidelines, Ms. Gera abandoned two decades of climbing the American academic and professional ladder, and set off on a drastic career change.

In 2010, Ms. Gera enrolled in Delhi University’s law program. There, she met Isha Khandelwal, 24, who also had redirected her trajectory from studying computer programming to studying human rights law in the capital. Together, and with the help of Ms. Bharadwaj, they founded a private legal aid group, operating on a shoestring budget comprising scholarships, donations, and personal savings.

Legal aid for adivasis is hard to come by. Article 39a in India’s Constitution mandates free legal representation for a huge percentage of the population. Still, more than two-thirds of inmates in Indian prisons — more than 265,000 people — are awaiting trial, according to the latest figures from the National Crimes Records Bureau. The situation is still more dire for the mostly adivasi defendants of southern Chhattisgarh, where both the Naxalites and the state’s armed forces have been accused of countless extrajudicial killings and the razing of entire villages, contributing to an entrenched security mentality.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Ms. Gera said. “We’re not saying that Naxalite attacks don’t happen. But when it comes down to it, most of these cases are completely baseless.”

In July 2013, Ms. Gera and Ms. Khandelwal, together with another recent graduate, Parijata Bharadwaj, 25, who is no relation to Sudha, moved to Jagdalpur and founded the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group, leaving behind fretful friends and families in cities far removed from the conflict. A year and a half later, the three are now four — joined by Guneet Kaur, 24, a recent law degree graduate from the University of California at Berkeley. The team of young lawyers is now known by a nickname reminiscent of a made-for-TV drama: JagLAG.

They live together, sharing spartan quarters in the office-cum-apartment. Mealtime conversations revolve around the dozens of cases they are juggling. There are no weekends, and trips home are few and far between.

Ms. Gera goes almost every week to the district court in a nearby town called Dantewada. On a recent morning, in an empty hallway of the court, she took a black sports coat out of her backpack, unfolded it, put it on, and affixed a white advocate’s collar around her neck. In a country where court complexes are ordinarily filled with commotion, this one was a scene of relative serenity. Barely a handful of people milled about. Lawyers and judges sat on plastic chairs in the courtyard, sipping tea in the winter sun.