Go BCI, break a leg! Exclusive: The Bar Council of India (BCI) reconfirmed that the fourth All India Bar Examination (AIBE) will be held on 25 November with no chances of postponement. The council will conduct the exam internally and has hired Noida-based IT implementation and delivery company ITES Horizons for additional help, because none of the tendering third party agencies to conduct the exam could be finalised.
BCI’s previous AIBE contractor Rainmaker will not be conducting the exam this time.
BCI chairman Manan Kumar Mishra said: “The date is very much final, no postponement. Rainmaker is not there this time, tenders were invited, interviews were held and after thorough consideration we have taken this decision. The council will conduct the exam. We are taking the help of some other boys we have engaged.”
The BCI had first notified on its website on 22 June that the fourth AIBE will be conducted in August, but had removed the words “to be held in August” from its notification somewhere between 22 and 24 June.
“There may have been a mistake on the part of the office but we are going to hold it in August,” said Mishra at the time.
The council had called for tenders from third party expert agencies in that notification.
On 1 August the BCI said that the exam was not likely to be conducted before October because three months of preparation for the conduct of the exam were required. It had received expressions of interest to conduct the exam from four organisations including Rainmaker.
On 21 August Legally India reported that the regulator had passed a resolution again, as in 2010, allowing graduates to practice in courts provisionally since the exam was not likely to be conducted before October or November. Graduates had to fulfil the additional formality of submitting a pro forma affidavit undertaking to practice provisionally until they qualify the AIBE.
On 5 September, around 7:30 PM the BCI notified the final date of 25 November for the exam, but barely an hour later some alleged that the notification had “disappeared” from the website. A few hours later the notification was seen to be back up again, but it was again not visible early next morning.
Mishra told Legally India today that he was not aware that the notification disappeared from the website twice since Wednesday.
BCI secretary Jogi Ram Sharma confirmed that the notification was not taken down by the BCI. “Must’ve been due to non-functioning of the website,” he said.
The third AIBE was held in January this year.
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1) LI, - nicely reported.
2) BCI running the exam - OMG.
Be professional BCI!!! if not for professions sake, at least for heaven’s sake.
myneta.info/bih2010/candidate.php?candidate_id=712
Best wishes,
Prachi
Well I tried going through their website and guess what? There is no information on who owns this company or runs it or their antecedents. Nothing out there (and everything not out there) gives one a sense of comfort of their expertise to run the show? For someone who is going to provide additional help (lord knows what that means)and which is an ITES implementation company, their own website does not work and there is no evidence of any sense of expertise. And what are they going to be paid? Where are all the RTI applications that were filed when Rainmaker was conducting the exam? What is ITES Horizon going to do? And where is that outrage over non-tendering this position?
Neither does LI or anyone out there question this or wait a minute, LI never takes a stance, they report faithfully.
Well, as I have always maintained these are attempts to consign the Bar Exam to the dustbin. And if today, I am questioning the BCI's competence to do, I also do it on the basis of the statements of the "boys" helping them out. Clearly, the BCI realised that it could not conduct this exam on its own and contracted Rainmaker at that time for conducting the Bar Exam. Surely, things have not changed to such an extent that they can now do it.
And would it not have been better for BCI to stay away from conducting the exam themselves? Any issues now with the Bar Exam will make them directly responsible. So, effectively now we are awaiting BCI's organisational capabilities to display itself at the cost of young lawyers. Why should I not be worried.
All this flip-flop just does not do justice to an important examination like the Bar Exam. Imagine the hue and cry if the CLAT did this or IIT-JEE mucked around like this? Instead of protests against the Bar Exam, these protests should be focussed on the cavalier (or is it callous?) attitude of the BCI in respect of the conduct. Their flip-flops are the ones that are impacting the next generation of lawyers not the conduct of the Bar Exam itself.
I am no longer just a bored lawyer, I am frankly a very depressed lawyer at these developments. RIP Bar Exam.
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