NLSIU Bangalore has reacted to today’s Supreme Court decision striking down the National Law Aptitude Test (NLAT), noting that it would re-join the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) as well as issue partial refunds, implementing the judgment “in letter and spirit”.
NLS, after “consultation with its Governing Bodies”, would “take all necessary steps to welcome a new batch of students to experience NLSIU’s unique and transformative educational experience”.
Faculty had also resolved earlier today that NLS “will do everything possible to respect its founding commitment to a Trimester based Academic Calendar and maintain the highest academic rigour and standards”.
“These intense teaching and learning practices make NLSIU India’s best Law School,” added the release (capitalisation not ours).
Partial fee refunds (and what's left)
According to the release (see above), NLS said it would also partially refund fees:
We have begun working with our Vendors to initiate refunds to all students.
Students may expect refunds, after a deduction of INR 75 as application processing charges, to reach them in the next 9-14 working days.
The NLAT application fees were only Rs 150 (or Rs 125 for candidates from certain reserved categories), only around 4% of the CLAT’s Rs 4,000.
However, that means that refunds would only work out to between 40 to 50% for NLAT candidates.
A total of 24,603 had registered for the undergraduate NLAT and 2,935 for the postgraduate exam.
At a total of 27,538 candidates, providing each of them claim their refunds, that would leave NLS with around Rs 20.7 lakh.
That might just be enough to cover expenses such as paying its vendor, which we had revealed to be a subsidiary of the global HR consultancy Aon and was unlikely to have come cheap.
Officially, neither Aon nor NLS have confirmed the name of the vendor to date, not even in the Supreme Court.
However, NLS senior counsel Arvind Datar had revealed in court that NLS had also instructed one of the “biggest audit firms in India” to conduct a forensic audit of its exam data trail, to ferret out any cheating or other malpractice.
We are not certain what the current status of that instruction is (indeed, whether it is continuing) and what the terms were under which fees to it would have been payable.
Consortium press release
Update 22:22: The NLU consortium has also released a statement:
Our faith in the judicial system has increased and we are grateful to all the lawyers who supported our stand. The Supreme Court judgment has come as a big relief to the thousands of students who were unnecessarily put of a lot of stress. We are glad that all our arguments have been accepted by the Supreme Court and our consortium has been judicially recognised as the appropriate body to conduct admission test for the member national law universities including NLSIU. We have been arguing that CLAT as a test was conceived due to the Supreme Court’s intervention in 2006-2007. NLSIU has been denying it by asserting that there was no judicial order. Today our stand got vindicated as Supreme Court had included this point in its judgment. The Court has also mentioned the litigation of 2018 and subsequent meetings at MHRD, Government of India along with BCI and Vice-Chancellors of National Law Universities leading to the registration of the Consortium in 2019 at Bangalore.
Now Supreme Court has discussed Consortium Bye-laws at length and has said relying on its earlier judgments that conducting admission test for several universities is in national interest and a student friendly initiative. The court has rejected the argument of consortium being a private body and acknowledged that it consists of statutory universities which had come together in larger public interest to improve legal education and conduct CLAT. NLSIU now has to admit students only through CLAT as NLAT has been quashed. This means NLSIU’s Executive Council’s decisions of August 12 and 18 were set aside as the same were found to be violative of both NLSIU Act, 1986 as well as Consortium by-laws. Similarly NLSIU’s justification of Zero year has been rejected and the court has accepted our argument that there are several ways in which academic calendar can be suitably modified.
As officiating Secretary of Consortium, I had even written to Prof Sudhir with the concurrence of our President Prof V. Vijayakumar on 11th September requesting him to cancel his test and come back to CLAT but unfortunately till date he has not even responded to our email. We are fully prepared to conduct CLAT on 28th September and of course NLSIU is an integral part of us and will cooperate with us in the smooth conduct of CLAT. Prof Sudhir was never removed from his post of Secretary- Treasurer but was merely asked not to discharge his duties temporarily due to the conflict of interests between CLAT to be conducted by Consortium and NLAT conducted by the NLSIU.
The Consortium office has not yet been transferred to NALSAR, Hyderabad. We are hopeful that bygone will treated as bygone and NLSIU will continue to play meaningful role in strengthening the Consortium. NLSIU being the oldest National Law University has the special responsibility of mentoring and helping other NLUs though in terms of legal status all National Law Universities have an equal status.
Faizan Mustafa
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Don't worry, all the financial irregularities and wasteful spending have been carefully documented by the University auditors. The truth will come out soon. [...]
Shameerpet refugee and gang are literally grasping at straws, if this is all they have. I understand the frustration man - your years of concerted anti-RVR campaign which was finally getting traction after you planted Sudhir as VC - but all that hard work comes undone so publicly with the SC quashing NLAT as well as the ceaseless reporting of how bad Sudhir’s tenure has been on most counts. I get it, man. But take the L, instead of embarrassing yourselves further Messers Refugee and Gatherer.
@kian: please don’t censor any of this, it’s perfectly fair comment.
I stand by my previous criticisms of many of the academic decisions made by Prof. R. Venkata Rao during his tenure as NLSIU Vice-Chancellor between May 2009 and July 2019. The most prominent of these were the following:
(a) repeated misuse of provisions for re-evaluation; including hundreds of instances where the answer scripts were never sent to any external or internal teachers.
(b) the non-appointment of permanent teachers for over a decade; the last proper round of permanent recruitments of faculty had happened in September 2006. NLSIU had to wait till February 2020 for another round of permanent recruitments.
(c) non-application of mind in the allocation of teaching responsibilities, with several foundational courses having collapsed for a long-time.
(d) no serious scrutiny of course plans or teacher performance,
(e) blindly accepting student requests for condoning attendance shortages, even where students had hardly attended 50% of the scheduled classes.
(f) granting blanket extensions for project submissions and the like.
Such laxity was frequently justified in the name of popularity. All of those criticisms were made in my own name and they have been in the public domain for several years now. I am happy to discuss these points further with anyone who wants to do so directly. You are most welcome to call me or send an email. I will not engage further with anonymous comments here.
At the same time, I strongly condemn the practice of making anonymous allegations such as those made in Comment 4.1.1. by a person using the pseudonym 'What About?'. Whoever has written those comments should have the courage to come out with credible evidence to support some of the more serious allegations, be it against any person. Otherwise, it is quite pointless to be making such allegations now. I agree with you that handing out mementos to guests and providing hospitality to visitors is a trivial issue.
While I did openly support Sudhir Krishnaswamy's appointment last year, it is quite a stretch to claim that I and some others have 'planted him as VC'. That part of your statement is plainly wrong and deserves to be rebutted. His name was duly recommended by a Search-cum-Selection Committee consisting of Dr. M.P. Singh, Mr. K..K. Venugopal and Mr. Arvind Datar, which in turn was appointed by the NLSIU Executive Council. The mobilisation of opinion among alumni and students only started after there were visible efforts to obstruct the completion of the appointment process. I do have a high opinion of Sudhir Krishnaswamy's scholastic abilities and his commitment towards academic excellence. So do many others who have studied or worked with him over the last two decades. That is why many of us supported his appointment. That does not mean that his decisions are above criticism.
The experience of the past year has shown that he has rushed into several administrative decisions without adequately considering their impact on students, be it the hurried drafting of rules for conducting online exams (May 2020), the lack of clarity owing to the changes made to the scholarship policy (August 2020) and most evidently the attempt to hold a separate entrance exam earlier this month. This only shows that the wider NLSIU community (faculty, students, staff, alumni) must be vigilant in pointing out the fallacies in such decisions.
After the NLAT was announced (on September 3, 2020) I did reach out to Sudhir (phone call on September 6, 2020) and directly cautioned him about the very real possibility of writ petitions being filed against it as well as the adverse affect it would have on relations with the other Vice-Chancellors of the various NLUs. Several others had directly conveyed the same message to him. I was constrained from commenting on the NLAT publicly since the matter was sub judice until September 21, 2020. Furthermore, Prof. Faizan Mustafa had already put forward most of the arguments against it in the public domain. In my present institutional role, there was no need for me to express any disagreement with what Prof. Mustafa has already said through his articles published in LiveLaw or the videos uploaded on his Youtube channel. The situation is very different from that in 2012-2013 when I had criticised some of the academic decisions made by Prof. R. Venkat Rao. At that time, I was employed at NLSIU and it was my professional duty to draw attention to academic malpractices at that institution when most of the faculty members were keeping quiet out of fear of administrative retaliation. Let us compare that with the present situation. I have been employed at NALSAR since June 2013 and Prof. Mustafa who has a considerable public platform had already taken on the mantle of criticising the sudden decision made by NLSIU. There was also a public clamour against the NLAT announcement, especially from law aspirants, coaching centres and a majority of present NLSIU students as well as alumni from recent batches. Most of the objections were already being voiced quite effectively and the case was argued with competence before the apex court.
The pandemic has obviously heightened sensitivities all around and there is definitely a trust-deficit at the moment. What has happened in the last 32 years of the institution's history is less important when compared to the needs of the present. As for the personalised advice about 'taking losses', I can assure you that I have taken many of them over the last 20 years and I am still very much here. I do intend to continue doing my job with honesty and transparency irrespective of which institution I am employed at. If that is ostensibly a cause for 'further embarrassment' in the coming years, so be it. That is the path I have chosen.
I would not comment about the role that you might have played in Sudhir's selection, since I do not wish to opine on the basis of conjecture. However, as a fellow academic who had obviously supported him openly in the past and would undoubtedly do so in the future too when he takes good decisions, you might have arguably had a duty to criticise his questionable decisions in public too, especially when it so clearly had an impact on accessibility and other academic issues that you seem to be concerned about. Had you not done that, I wouldn't have exactly blamed you. However, your present comment containing rather flimsy justifications for your earlier silence raises more questions than it responds to. You may still feel free to ignore my anonymous opinion though, you don't owe myself or anyone else any excuse or justification.
There are presumably 100s of different reasons to stay silent and a private individual is under no obligation to speak out just because we live in an age of social media where everyone has an opinion and they may have shared opinions before?
A. He has spoken in favour of X getting into a certain position earlier, so if he doesn't speak against X when X is doing wrong things while in that position, then the assumption would be that he supports it too.
B. He gave certain justification that did not appear to be based on solid reasoning. Now that he has said that his employer directed him not to go public on this matter, I'm willing to accept his word for that in good faith.
I think you missed the part about my present institutional role at NALSAR. I was advised not to comment on the NLAT publicly while the matter was sub judice since Prof. Mustafa was planning to file an affidavit on behalf of the NLU Consortium. He did so in his capacity as the NALSAR Vice-Chancellor and his affidavit stressed upon the need to preserve the NLU Consortium and strengthen the CLAT. I agree with those submissions in entirety. In fact, in our earlier report on the working of the NLUs, we had strongly recommended the incorporation of feedback from groups such as IDIA to improve the quality of the CLAT. Holding a separate entrance exam (even as an emergency measure) takes away from that long-term goal.
This is a an appeal to FM since many of his brethren in the Consortium are known RTI-phobics. NLS itself has fairly convoluted process of accepting RTI fees that discourages anyone outside Nagarbhavi.
By the way, can someone please upload a copy of Varun Bhagat? Kian, please get in touch with FM, RVR, GShanks
Thodi mehnat kar liya karo bhai!
#SanskariBano
A law university which spells 'judgment' wrong !!!
First para says 'judgement' and second 'judgment' !!!
Never will you see anyone from Law School attacking other NLUs with so much hatred. The comments by Chirayu were made in jest, just like chants in fests. As for Prashant, he never directly attacked any college and does he not have a right under Article 19 to defend Sudhir? Prashant is a very respected scholar and author.
I would like to warn you all that you are seriously jeopardising your goodwill. You will note that Sudhir has not hired a single alumni of other NLUs in the recruitment drive. Soon this pattern will be replicated in law firms.
About law firms, please don't make me laugh. Unless that's the new NLSIU policy, getting alumni partners not to offer jobs people from other law schools and thereby try to improve their flagging day zero performance. Who cares about your goodwill? Your current VC certainly didn't show any to even his own future students! So quit while you are ahead. In the SC, you haven't done so recently.
what chirayu comments were in jest you are also doing the same thing degrading the other law colleges. Maybe that is also in jest, maybe nls students and alumni have a habit of belittling others in jest
NOT CANCELLED:
1. Gopal Shankarnarayan: Fought for justice.
2. Srividhya Raghavan: Opposed NLAT.
CANCELLED:
Everyone else.
2. Mr Sudhir Created unnecessary distrust in consortium
3. If its not a law school university, I would have blamed VC only for bad decision not for poor knowledge of law. But here an Ex NLSIU grad, Law researcher showed very poor knowledge Law. It surely tarnished the reputation of a great Organization built through years by stalwarts
4. NLAT decision made without even minimal sympathetic consideration of 70000 aspirants who are preparing for 2.5 years. How he will make future lawyers who will be sympathetic, concerned for the weaker section of the society
5. I will also blame Executive Committee comprising HC/SC judges and big Lawyers for approving this poor, whimsical NLAT proposition
Is Mr. Sudhir accountable by any means for all the above high cost and high impact mistakes? Or he can shrug off this SC scolding as "Minor issue" or "No Probs"
-------------------------------------------------
How can you be so sure? :) We know Mr. Sudhir's achievements but not mine :) We know Mr. Sudhir's Admin and legal decision making capability (!?) but you cannot tell same for me :)
Just for your information I am not a law professional . I am an tech graduate and MBA from premiere institutes and currently working as GM in MNC outside India successfully. I also have few published papers although I was not in academics ever.
My daughter is in Class 11 and a NLU aspirant thats why I am following the NLU and Clat news. Sad to see this administrative mess created by a professional as a professional and also as a guardian.
twitter.com/chirayuuuu/status/1308434220826517504
Kian - maybe you can look into this representation, and what the attitude is across generations of alumni regarding Sudhir. There definitely is a generational divide between the CLAT+RVR kids and the older pre-CLAT folks who are basically blind to the excesses of the current administration (save for a few notable exceptions).
twitter.com/LiveLawIndia/status/1325682300420386817
webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mPKH-swGMfYJ:www.goa.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/DELEGATION-OF-NATIONAL-LAW-SCHOOL-MEETS-CM.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in
www.thegoan.net/goa-inshorts/%EF%BB%BFdelegation-of-national-law-school-meets-cm-discusses-project-to-set-up-international-varsity/61356.html
www.uniindia.com/delegation-of-national-law-school-meets-goa-cm/west/news/2226030.html
1) The Dark Lord takes over as VC of Hogwarts. Makes public comment to the Daily Prophet that there are too many mudbloods and muggles from "tier 2 cities".
2) Does fee hike, separate entrance test etc.
3) Mobilises alumni to get mudbloods and muggles quota struck down by court, refuses to implement quota for students from underprivileged wizarding families.
4) Applies for Institution of National Importance application, but stuck due to many reasons.
5) Remembers Goa govt going to set up a law school names after Parrikar.
6) Lobbies with CM to set up an "international law school" which will be the second campus of Hogwarts.
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