Today, the Bar Council of India has told the Delhi High Court that conducting CLAT in languages other than English would give opportunities to more citizens to appear in the exams
"The Bar Council of India support the issue raised by the Petitioner for conducting the CLAT examination in languages other than English as the same will give opportunities to more citizens of the country to appear in the exam and pursue law as career," the BCI said.
To this, BCI, submits that according to the Legal Education Rules, English has to be the medium of instruction in both the integrated five-year and three-year law courses.
If the medium of instruction of legal education is other than English, students have to take English as a compulsory paper, it added.
Further, BCI said that the All India Bar Examination is held in 23 different languages which includes English, Hindi and other regional languages. The Consortium of National Law Universities earlier told the high court that preparedness of the upcoming CLAT-2024 is at an advanced stage and any judicial order compelling the introduction of additional language options this year without any deliberations and studies, would result in serious administrative and operational issues.
The committee held its first meeting on June 25 and framed certain issues relating to the subject matter, it said. The petitioner has contended that "in a hyper-competitive paper, they (students from non-English language background) are linguistically disempowered as they have to surpass the additional hurdle of learning and mastering a new language".
The petitioner was represented through senior advocate Jayant Mehta and lawyers Akash Vajpai and Sakshi Raghav.
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