The Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) 2015 will be attempted by 39,686 candidates for around 1,700 undergraduate (UG) seats in 16 of India’s National Law Universities (NLU) on 10 May.

A total of 5,514 CLAT 2015 candidates will compete for LLM seats in the NLUs.

CLAT 2015 convenor RMLNLU Lucknow received 45,200 total applications for the exam after it extended the application deadline from 31 March to 14 April, confirmed RMLNLU joint registrar Dr JD Gangwar.

That number is around 20 per cent higher than last year, and is the most significant bump in applicants in recent years.

The highest number of applications – 9628 – were from Uttar Pradesh while one application was from Daman & Diu, two from Lakshwadeep and six from Andaman, he said.

Gangwar told Legally India that around 400 out of the 39,686 UG applications were from candidates above the traditional age limit for CLAT eligibility that was recently overturned.

The Allahabad high court and the Rajasthan high court recently gave, respectively, final and interim orders directing RMLNLU Lucknow to accept the CLAT applications of candidates of all ages, and RMLNLU Lucknow has filed for a review or recall of the Allahabad high court’s final order.

General candidates above the age of 20 years and special category candidates above the age of 22 years can apply for the exam in the interim, until there is no final decision on the age limit rule.

31,231 candidates competed for 1660 seats in CLAT 2014, which was conducted by GNLU Gandhinagar.