The Delhi High Court has issued notice to the National Law Universities and Bar Council of India (BCI) on a petition that demands the Common Law Admission Test for the year 2024 (CLAT 2024) to 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 have given the authorities four weeks to respond to the petition.
The bench has decided to hear the case on May 19 for further discussions.
At present, the CLAT is conducted only in English which as per the petitioner is gross injustice to students from non-English medium.
The plea stated that the CLAT discriminates between people who knw english and those who dont.
As per the petition CLAT does not provide opportunity to the students who belong 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.
As per the plea,aspirants belonging to English-medium schools have an advantage over their peers belonging to schools operating in Hindi or other vernacular languages.
The petition, was filed by a law student Sudhanshu Pathak from Delhi university citing a survey by the Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access to legal education (IDIA) Trust.
As per the survey 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 petitioner claimed that 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.