Today, the Delhi High Court seeks a response from the Bar Council of India and Consortium of NLU demanding to conduct the Common Law Admission Test, 2024 (CLAT 2024) be conducted in all regional languages which are listed in the eighth schedule of the Indian Constitution.
The division bench of Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Subramonium Prasad granted 1 month to respond to the petition. Currently, CLAT is only conducted in the English language.
The Counsel member for petitioner Senior Advocate Jayant Mehta along with advocates Akash Vajpai and Sakshi Raghav has argued that this causes gross injustice to students from nothe n-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.
"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.
The next day of the hearing is on 19th May.
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