Delhi High Court seeks response from BCI, NLUs on plea to conduct CLAT 2024 in regional languages

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday issued notice to Consortium of National Law Universities and Bar Council of India (BCI) on a petition demanding that the Common Law Admission Test for the year 2024 (CLAT 2024) be conducted in all regional languages listed in the eighth schedule of the Constitution. .A division bench of Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Subramonium Prasad granted the authorities four weeks to respond to the petition. The case will be heard next on May 19. .At present, CLAT is conducted only in English. The petition has argued that this causes gross injustice to students from non-English medium."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. It added, "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.".The petition, filed by a Delhi University law student Sudhanshu Pathak, cited a survey by the Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access to legal education (IDIA) Trust. The survey revealed that over 95% of surveyed students studying in National Law Universities (NLUs) came from schools where the medium of instruction was English both at the secondary and higher secondary level. The petition contended that this was not surprising given that CLAT is an entrance examination that demand a high degree of proficiency in English, which is a mark of privilege, and thereby provides an inherent advantage to students from an English medium background. "This figure has been more or less consistent with the results of the 2013-14 survey wherein 96.77% 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.