As many as 51,000 students have applied for this year’s edition of the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT 2017).

Vice-Chancellor of Chanakya National Law University (CNLU) Patna and this year’s Convenor Prof A Lakshminath was quoted as saying,

“As of now, around 45,000 candidates have applied for CLAT UG programme and 6,000 for the PG programme.”

Prof Lakshminath also said that that the number of applications rose exponentially after the Supreme Court stayed the Bar Council of India’s age limit rule in March.

Further, he mentioned that the state-wise and gender-wise break-up of applicants will be provided soon. Last year, out of 45,037, four applicants belonged to the transgender community.

CLAT Mentor Rajneesh Singh said in a Facebook post that the number of applicants has increased by 12.3% from last year.

Another NLU, Maharashtra National Law University, Nagpur has been added to the  fold this year, taking the total number of CLAT law schools to eighteen. Besides these, as many as twenty-seven law schools will consider CLAT scores for admission.