Delhi HC Seeks BCI, NLUs Response on Plea to Conduct CLAT 2024 In Regional Languages

CLAT is currently only offered in English. According to the petition, this causes gross injustice to students who study in languages other than English.

New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Wednesday issued notice to te consortium of National Law Universities (NLUs) and Bar Council of India (BCI) on a plea seeking A Common Law Admission Test for 2024 (CLAT 2024) be held in all regional languages listed in the eighth schedule of the Constitution of India. The authorities were given four weeks to answer to the petition by a division bench of Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Subramonium Prasad. The bench listed the case for the next hearing on May 19.

CLAT is currently only offered in English. According to the petition, this causes gross injustice to students who study in languages other than English. “CLAT discriminates against and fails to provide a level playing field to the students belonging to educational backgrounds rooted in regional languages. In a hyper-competitive paper, they are linguistically disempowered as they have to surpass the additional hurdle of learning and mastering a new language,” the plea stated.

“Naturally, aspirants belonging to English medium schools have an advantage over their peers belonging to schools operating in Hindi or other vernacular languages. The underprivileged and disempowered aspirants can never view an exam solely based in English as ‘obvious’ unlike their privileged, English-speaking competitors.” A survey by the Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access to Legal Education (IDIA) Trust was highlighted in the plea, which was submitted by Sudhanshu Pathak, a Delhi University law student.

According to the survey, more than 95 per cent of questioned students enrolled at National Law Universities (NLUs) attended secondary and higher education institutions where English was the primary language of teaching. The petition said that this was not unexpected given that CLAT is an entrance exam that requires a high level of English proficiency, which is a signal of privilege, and thus gives students from an English-medium background an inherent advantage.

“This figure has been more or less consistent with the results of the 2013-14 survey wherein 96.77 per cent of the surveyed students came from English medium backgrounds, indicating that proficiency in the English language continues to be a major factor for gaining admission to a top NLU in the country,” the petitioner said. Senior advocate Jayant Mehta, along with advocates Akash Vajpai and Sakshi Raghav, appeared for the petitioner.