The Bar Council of India (BCI) has quietly but significantly changed the All India Bar Exam (AIBE) syllabus since last time, possibly making it quite a bit harder, wrote iPleaders co-founder Abhyuday Aggarwal on Live Law yesterday.

Full disclosure: iPleaders is a some time advertiser on Legally India, and Legally India had started the bar exam preparation service Barhacker with Aggarwal in 2009.

AIBE X will have four new subjects, while four subjects have been dropped from the syllabus.

The BCI has added to the AIBE syllabus:

• public interest litigation,
• taxation,
• intellectual property, and
• the Land Acquisition Act 1894.

Deleted from the syllabus are:

• corporate social responsibility,
• jurisprudence, and
• the Limitation Act 1963.

While the new syllabus is available online on the AIBE’s official website, the syllabus up to the AIBE IX does not appear to have been online.

Aggarwal had writen in his post on Live Law:

We noticed that the syllabus for the All India Bar Examination has been changed, relatively quietly. There is no new notification on the website for the exam but those who click on the syllabus link on the homepage and go through the syllabus carefully will notice that there is some difference.

We are not clear exactly when this change took place, owing to absence of a formal notification. Further, on first glance you would not notice a change, since the total number of subjects stays the same at 19, so if you visited the site earlier and took down the old subjects, you might not notice there’s a change until you go through each subject.

We don’t want there to be any chances of you missing it, hence we are writing about the new syllabus.

We spoke to a candidate for the upcoming AIBE, who confirmed that he only found out yesterday that the syllabus had been changed, as the BCI had not explicitly informed registered candidates of the change.

The BCI has been rather opaque in conducting this edition of the exam on other fronts too: it secretly hiked the exam registration fees significantly and had re-appointed controversial bar exam contractor ITES Horizon in a dubious manner.

Then again, the BCI’s opacity has been a bit of a way of life for the legal profession in India generally, as our reportage on the topic the past few years suggests.