Education Ministry Gives Nod to Conduct CLAT 2024 in Regional Languages; Check Details Here

New Delhi: The Consortium of National Law Universities has informed the Delhi High Court that CLAT 2024 preparations are far along and that any judicial order requiring the addition of new language options this year, without consultation, will have a significant negative impact on administrative and operational issues.

Currently, the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) takes place in English. The CLAT 2024 is scheduled for December 3, 2023.

The consortium announced that it has established an expert group made up of the vice chancellors of the five member NLUs to investigate the possibility of offering the exam in additional languages and to create a thorough roadmap after considering the perspectives of key stakeholders and potential roadblocks.

The argument was presented as part of a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) that aimed to have CLAT 2024 conducted in regional languages as well.

The expert group, which was established to consider conducting the CLAT in several languages, was instructed by a bench of Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Subramonium Prasad to make a judgement at its scheduled meeting in August 2023.

The top court set a new hearing date of September 1, 2023, for the case.

Sudhanshu Pathak, a law student at Delhi University, filed the PIL, which alleged that the CLAT (UG) test "discriminates" against students whose educational backgrounds are based in regional languages and that it fails to provide a "level playing field" for them.

Senior advocate Jayant Mehta, together with attorneys Akash Vajpai and Sakshi Raghav, represented the petitioner.

The consortium responded by stating that the expert committee's findings will enable it to plan appropriately in advance for administering the exam in other languages in the upcoming years after resolving any anticipated challenges.

The committee's first meeting took place on June 25, 2023, and several important topics were covered, according to the announcement.

"Respondent No. 1 (consortium) is therefore already actively addressing the issue of holding CLAT in scheduled language options, but the procedure requires careful planning and preparation in order to prevent any complaints from the student community regarding disparity in study materials, failure to ensure testing fairness, and other issues that could jeopardise the integrity of the CLAT exam," it said.

The consortium does not disagree with the need to look into the matter further, according to the response. Even if English is the primary language of instruction at all NLUs, it would be extremely premature for the courts to step in at this point without data demonstrating that there is already a sizable pool of students who desire to take the exam in the scheduled languages.

Given the already advanced state of preparation for the upcoming CLAT 2024 exam, it was stated that any judicial order requiring the addition of new language options this year alone, without the benefit of internal studies and discussions and without giving the respondent No. 1 (consortium) any time to make necessary preparations on all the identified parameters, would cause grave harm to the respondent No. 1.

It further stated that any broad directive, as requested for in the writ suit, would lead to major administrative and operational problems, which would be detrimental to both the conduct of this year's examination and the aspirants' continuous preparation.

"Such changes to the examination pattern may end up being made in a knee-jerk manner, which, in turn, will cause the student community that is already preparing for the examination grave hardship," it said.

The consortium had previously been asked by the high court, "If entrance exams for engineering and medical programmes can be held in regional languages, why not CLAT?"

"They (students from non-English language backgrounds) are linguistically disempowered in a hyper-competitive paper, as they have to surpass the additional hurdle of learning and mastering a new language," the petitioner claimed in the request.

Naturally, students who attend schools where English is the primary language have an edge over their counterparts who attend schools where Hindi or another local language is used. In contrast to their wealthier, English-speaking opponents, the poor and disempowered hopefuls can never view an exam that is only based in English as being "obvious," the plea argued.

Prior to this, the high court had sent notifications to the Consortium of National Law Universities, the Bar Council of India, and the Centre via the Union Ministry of Education, requesting their comments on the case.

According to the petition, mother language instruction must be provided in schools and higher education facilities in accordance with the New Education Policy of 2020 and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act of 2009.

It is regrettable that a significant number of students who have studied in their regional or native languages are being denied the opportunity to choose a five-year LLB program because English is the sole language used for the CLAT (UG).

"With this petition, the petitioner is asking for the issuance of a suitable writ or directive to respondent No. 1 to conduct CLAT 2024 in all other regional languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India as well as English, as the practise of only offering the CLAT (UG) in English has a discriminatory element that violates Articles 14 and 29 (2) of the Constitution," it said.

Read More: 

• CLAT 2024 Participating Colleges

• CLAT Exam Dates 2024 (Out): Check Registration, Admit Card, Result & Counselling Schedule

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