Upendra Baxi delineated the following typologies:
- Civil Rights Activists: Focus on civil and political rights.
- People Rights Activists: Focus on social and economic rights amidst state repression.
- Consumer Rights Groups: Raise consumer rights issues within accountability framework.
- Bonded Labour Groups: Advocate for annihilation of wage slavery.
- Citizens for Environmental Action: Combat environmental degradation and pollution.
- Citizen Groups against Large Irrigation Projects: Seek orders against mega irrigation projects.
- Rights of Child Groups: Focus on child labor, literacy, juveniles, and rights of children born to sex workers.
- Custodial Rights Groups: Social action by prisoners’ rights groups, women under state custody, and persons under preventive detention.
- Poverty Rights Groups: Litigate issues concerning drought, famine relief, and urban impoverished.
- Indigenous People’s Rights Groups: Agitate for issues of forest dwellers, citizens of Fifth and Sixth Schedules, and identity rights.
- Women’s Rights Groups: Agitate for gender equality, gender-based violence, rape, and dowry murders.
- Bar-based Groups: Agitate for autonomy and accountability of Indian judiciary.
- Media Autonomy Groups: Focus on autonomy and accountability of press and state-owned mass media.
- Assorted Lawyer-Based Groups: Critically influential lawyers’ groups agitating for various causes.
- Assorted Individual Petitioners: Freelance activist individuals.