Yaar at least have a good comeback. What is this typical uncle-level "is this what your parents taught you"/"your upbringing is visible" comment? 5th class ke teacher ho kya?
You did not show a single metric where JGLS is ahead. Also, how is it that the media called your recruitments to be the 'best' without knowing about the figures from other law schools? In addition, what parameter did you use to call it best yourself? JGLS has placed less than 20% of its batch in this year. If you are talking about absolute numbers, then that goes without saying, since a JGLS batch is bigger than batches from NLSIU, NALSAR, NUJS and NLUD combined.
JGLS has has employed people as faculty who struggled to clear their LLB subjects in their NLUs, did not publish a single piece in their life, did not get any job after graduation, spent parent's money to get a sponsored foreign LLM. I won't name the people concerned though.
Hilarious. A challenge to the guy/troll who posted that comment about "serious scholarship": Please share with us ONE published article by a Jindal faculty-member which is as terrible as this one shared above which is by a professor from a top 3 NLU. A single one will do. Time to back your claims with evidence. Eagerly awaiting your response :)
The article has a stupid click-baity type byline saying JGLS took on the 'old guard', when in fact JGLS is younger by just 10 years to the oldest NLUs (except NLS, B'luru) and elder to most new NLUs.
Also, JGLS has done nothing but exposed the trick of the NLUs, i.e., highly privileged, and therefore, naturally competent students joined it, which raised the quality at NLUs. Now JGLS thought it can play that game as well. Fix high fees, get the most privileged bunch of people, and ride on the coat-tails of privileged background of students joining it and then start running around brandishing taking on the imaginary 'old guard'.
Wow, this comment perfectly embodies the irrational hate the NLU-ites on this website have for Jindal, the way it throws around unsubstantiated allegations and seems to be an emotional knee-jerk reaction to the fact that NLUs don't have the same level of monopoly and exclusivity any more as before. If you're truly secure and confident in the education you've received, this really shouldn't bother you - deal with it like an adult.
To everyone here who are commenting in favour of JGLS, I have got such one question to ask. To clarify, I do not have any problem with JGLS at all. If a student can afford to study there, then there is no reason why they should not. Other than the huge batch size and the fees, I do not see any downside at all. However, why is it that any piece of news involving JGLS automatically brings the NLUs up in comparison? I am not talking about commentators trolling, but about official pieces from the university representatives or coverage from media after interacting with such representatives. It is not as if every time NLSIU issues its own news or achievements, it compares itself with other institutions. To an impartial observer, this really seems like JGLS has got this chip on its shoulder. In addition, perhaps taking a bit of liberty with facts doesn't always help JGLS' case? Again, had it been a case of people trolling, like someone has done above by calling an individual faculty run journal of dubious quality as 'one of the best' from NUJS, then I wouldn't have brought this up. Trolls would troll. But this is a case of official university representatives putting up such matters. Even few years back, JGLS had put up on its official website a claim that it has got the best placements of all Indian law schools. When people started laughing and being derisive at the obvious falsehood, they hastily changed it to all Indian private law schools. This doesn't really help their cause and that's something they and you would have to understand.
Even in this year, JGLS seems to have had a very good placement scene. But calling it the best in the country is still not helping your cause, because it simply isn't. You can't place 10-20% of a batch and claim it to be the best. Not your fault, in absolute numbers the jobs surely are more than any individual NLU. Yet NLSIU was called the best not because it placed the most grads in numbers, but because anyone who studies there and wants a job would usually be placed. There is a huge difference.
If you want to claim your faculty to be the best in the country, then I do not have any objection as such. Other law schools also do the same. The metric is really subjective and the issue would never be resolved conclusively. Do remember though that a key factor of being a good teacher is the ability to produce good students. JGLS is producing good students even now. However, even the brightest JGLS students do not really show any obvious advantage over the brightest NLU students. Same goes for the average students out of these institutions. So clearly, the faculty aren't producing very different output in these cases, so claiming one set to be the best is always going to be challenged.
Your infra is obviously the best of all Indian law schools. People pay more for it and get the results on that front.
In the end, why not just be happy for your own institute and keep making it better than it used to be yesterday, instead of all these needless and meaningless comparisons? This is meant for all the people involved, whether from JGLS or from NLUs. I would have called the exercise and flexing juvenile, regardless of the fact that one institution's authority figures and not only students, are clearly fanning this absurdity for their own agenda.
your assumptions show how much you know. I'm not an NLU Kid. I'm actually a JGLS student myself. I'd just rather we focus on making the institution better than do PR about nonsense and try and game the ranking system. You can't keep shining up a turd and calling it gold. I find all this PR a bit distasteful tbh.
Does Jindal not have a PR Team? Do they not repeatedly send out press releases and pursue relationships with journalists to push the "news" about the university? even if no one gets paid behind all this- at the very least I am saying that junior journalists often don't have the sense to ask tough questions and take a critical stance, they instead just reproduce whatever their interviewees say.
It's entirely possible that a few people in every jgls batch are smart and motivated and invested in their education. If you have 800 people you will have a few smart motivated people just because of random chance. But let us not kid ourselves, most of the students just don't work as hard as they should. They get jaded pretty fast and would rather pursue social relationships than taking their education seriously. Covid and online education made this even worse. I'm bored being a student here and not having intellectual stimulation tbh.
When have you seen Baxi on campus? I would really like to know? I haven't seen him. I haven't seen a lot of these "star faculty" people at all. There's clearly some dishonesty about how many people are actively teaching each semester and what that does to the student-faculty ratio right? In a university with a 1:10, 1:9 ratio, your class size for mandatory courses should not be more than 30 students- is that happening? For elective courses, you should have elective classes with 10-15 students working in a group- do we have that?
Have you looked at the faculty development policy? Do you know what their incentives are? they're to publish as much as possible in Scopus, not to publish serious impactful work that takes time. For every Saptarshi Mandal or Mohsin Alam or Oishik Sircar you have tens of AIs who don't know the basics of the subjects they're teaching and who publish nonsense. Pointing to the exception proves the rule tbh. Other universities also do scam- that doesnt make us not scam. get out of here with that whataboutery.
Of course a motivated good jindal student has all the opportunity in the world. OFCOURSE they have better opportunities than NLU students. They always did- they're wealthier, they're paying at least 4 times more fees, and money gets you a lot of things at JGLS. But let's talk about exposure. Exposure to what? To America? England? Or rootedness in our own country and the problems of our own people? How many people on campus even know or care about caste? even understand poverty or hunger? how many students can even name all the seven states in the north east of the country or point to vidarbha on a map or name the MP from sonipat? we live in a bubble. If you don't face it you can't burst it.
How many students on campus really don't know much law, get by with hooliganism and doing the very basics and essentially promotion because professors are discouraged from failing people? how many students on campus dont get jobs or only get them because of their contacts/ family?
If we keep telling others the big lie that everything is hunky dory, we will believe it ourselves and we will be worse off for it.
I graduated from a top 3 NLU many moons ago before Jindal was even conceived. My years of practice has shown me that NLU grads who think they're hot stuff because of their college are the biggest fools and failures. Anyone who pegs competence in law to college of graduation in India is a certified idiot. I've met plenty of folks from non-NLUs who have far exceeded their NLU counterparts in the profession. In this backdrop, it is quite amusing to see how insecure and threatened some NLUers are by Jindal. [...]
you are on a platform where ppl believe NLU tag is bigger than Harvard and Oxford. Theres no way they will digest that any institution (not just a law school) is way ahead of them.
Ah yes, the usual triggered NLU kid [...] frothing at the mouth at any mention of "Jindal" - a word which seems to trigger some sort of repressed vulnerability inside him. Firstly, bold of you to assume that all media coverage about Jindal is a result of some sort of insidious backdoor payment from Jindal. If that is true, it's indeed incredibly sad that no publication, even niche paid-subscription ones like The Ken, has any journalistic integrity left. I'm sure Jindal also bribes Jessup judges and other moots too, considering their performance over the years. The QS organisation must also be a naive and gullible bunch of halfwits, since Jindal has so clearly deceived them into giving them a high rank.
As far as "serious scholarship" goes, do you mean to say Upendra Baxi and the likes of him are not serious scholars? That Jindal has a stellar faculty is a well-stablished fact at this point even among the NLU-ite trolls on LI. Apart from the obvious eminent scholars whose work needs no introduction, faculty at Jindal is generally internationally published (and/or Oxford/Cambridge/Ivy League educated) and even cited by the Supreme Court (eg. Saptarshi Mandal cited in the homosexuality judgment). Student research also spans across all top journals (feel free to go view past issues) as well as International publications, with the Jindal Global Law Review being one of the handful of SCOPUS-indexed law journals in India.
Whether you like it or not, the fact remains: a good student at Jindal has far greater exposure and resources to exploit than a good student at an NLU (which is to say, far greater faculty, infrastructure, networking opportunities, diversity in the knowledge taught for eg. 200+ elective options per sem, and also a rapidly growing alumni base across law firms), of course, given that he/she has the drive and motivation to utilise the resources at his/her disposal which is what I mean when I say "good student".
How has JGLS 'beaten' the NLUs in their own game exactly? Last I checked, most people still don't go to JGLS if they have scored a high CLAT rank. One can study at the NLUs for a fraction of JGLS' fees and still get all the opportunities offered to their JGLS counterparts. Nor does JGLS place higher percentage of their batch compared to NLUs or get more foreign LLM scholarships etc. The headline of this post is highly misleading. [...]
Hey moderator, how is it trollish to say that NLU kids are having a meltdown (which they clearly are if you see the comments) but not trollish to make completely unsubstantiated allegations like Jindal is paying the Ken, Jindal is paying QS etc???? Also, this troll claims that JGLS faculty articles on Scopus journals are of poor quality. Well, how come most NLU faculty can't even publish anything in these journals?? And I am reproducing an article published by a senior NUJS professor in a journal which is supposedly one of the top journals of NUJS. It is from a thread on LI itself.
We now have confirmation from the media that JGLS had the best placements of all law schools this year and that JGLS is in the same league as tier 1 NLU. 🙏 Note that the Ken is a left-wing media outlet of the type that is stanned by the NLU community (like the Wire, Caravan etc) rather than mainstream corporate media. 🌝
JGLS has also consistently outperformed NLUs in QS. Only 1 NLU (NLSIU) even makes it to QS. 😂
The only spaces where JGLS trails are:
👉 NIRF ranking: but then NLU people posting here themselves diss NIRF, barring NLSIU and NLUD people. 😂
👉Jessup and Vienna moot wins: but AFAIK only 1 NLU (NLSIU) has won Jessup and 1 has won Vienna (NUJS). JGLS has come second in Vienna, so not too far behind. JGLS has also won many other prestigious international moots.
👉 Rhodes scholarships: Agreed that JGLS needs to do better here, but JGLS alumni have got every other prestigious scholarship: Fulbright, Gates, Chevening, Commonwealth etc. 💪 And it's not that other NLUs are brimming with Rhodes scholars. Other than NLSIU, no other NLU has more than 5 AFAIK.
In my NLU more than half of the CAM offers were rejected, even then CAM got recruits in double digits. So CAM hiring in big numbers doesn't necessarily means good, it just probably means the rejected offers accumulated and they exploded on Jindal as it went last. But off course hiring has improved over the years by different firms. That cannot be ignored.
I mean. Do we have to pretend that jgls is not paying for media coverage? Can the jgls PR team stop? No one is buying it. You have one student who gets one scholarship that someone or other gets every year- you post on here. You place 1/6th of your batch- you post on here. There’s nothing remarkable about your QS rankings when you’ve hired people from QS to work for you and when you scam the system by counting publications of people who have left jgu and by hiring people to publish uninspired kind of bad articles as long as it’s on some scopus journal. That’s not a reflection of serious scholarship. There’s not much remarkable about your graduate outcomes when kids just go to work for papa. That’s not a reflection of how employable your students are. Just stop. No one is buying it.
Talk about puff pieces! Never did she mention that JGLS actually takes in everyone who can pay, which accounts for them attracting "students in droves" and they only manage to place around 10-15% of their batch yet.
How a private law school took on the old guard in India OP Jindal Global University’s law school charges the highest fees, but still attracts students in droves. It’s now a worthy rival to India’s reputed National Law Universities
Jindal Global Law School (JGLS) caused quite a stir earlier in August when it said 103 candidates from the current batch of about 500 students had secured job offers in the first round of placements.
The biggest recruiters were some of India’s best-paying and most sought-after law firms, such as Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas (CAM), AZB & Partners, Indus Law, Khaitan & Co, Saraf & Partners, Trilegal, and Veritas Legal.
CAM, India’s largest law firm, alone onboarded 44 candidates. People had to take note.
“A tier-1 law firm hiring those many from a single college… the numbers are unheard of,” an associate working at CAM tells The Ken. To put things into perspective, in 2020 [when the associate joined], CAM hired about 70 people through campus placements and pre-placement offers.
CAM is just one of the many law firms that have ramped up hiring from JGLS in the last few years. Interestingly, it doesn’t hire that many candidates from many National Law Universities (NLUs) in the country or older rivals of JGLS—Symbiosis Law School and Amity Law School.
“JGLS wasn’t taken very seriously in its early years, but the quality of education and faculty made all the difference. In the last few years, recruitments (from the school) have shot up,” says Akanksha Antil, founder of legal talent management firm To Whom It May Concern and former head of talent management at CAM.
Set up in 2009 by the steel and power business tycoon Naveen Jindal, JGLS was the first school established under O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU) in Sonipat, a city 35km north of New Delhi.
Last year, JGU broke into the top 500 universities in the QS Graduate Employability Rankings, which assesses universities’ ability to produce graduates with the skills required for the workforce. JGU is the only Indian university focused on the social sciences to be featured in these rankings.
Like Naveen Jindal, several business leaders have entered the space recently. There’s Haryana-based BML Munjal University, named after the man who founded the Hero Group; Mahindra University in the southern Indian state of Telangana; and the Times Group-owned Bennett University in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The Indian Institute of Management Rohtak, an hour’s drive from JGU, has also thrown its hat in the ring by announcing a five-year integrated programme in law.
There are over 1,500 private law colleges and 23 NLUs in India.
AUTHOR
Shruti Sonal
Shruti is a Delhi-based reporter who looks at India's clean energy ecosystem through the lens of the intersection between businesses, policy and environment. She has previously worked with Reuters and Outlook Business.
Industrial houses buying media companies may be a recent trend, but their interest in universities is a feature of the last decade.
I distinctly remember a meeting with an Indian-born professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was December 2008, and I was visiting Boston for work. The professor, the head of a department I shall not name, said many Indian business tycoons had been visiting him at MIT to seek his help (and support) in setting up private universities in India.
The visibly perplexed professor told me that he had declined those requests. I was reminded of that conversation when I read Shruti’s story today. It’s a conspicuous example of that unfolding trend.
Set up in 2009 by the steel and power industrialist Naveen Jindal, Jindal Global Law School (JGLS) was the first school established under O.P. Jindal Global University in Sonipat, a city 35km north of New Delhi.
Today, it’s the most sought-after law school in India. This month, JGLS published a note saying it had placed 103 (out of about 500 students in the current batch) in the first round of placements itself. Cyril Amardas Mangalchand, India’s largest law firm, alone onboarded 44 candidates.
How can you not take note?
There are over 1,500 private law colleges and 23 National Law Universities (NLUs) in India. Yet, JGLS takes in the highest number of students, at about 900 per year. It charges the most, too. For the five-year B.A. LLB (Honours), students pay nearly Rs 8 lakh (US$10,000) per annum, nearly three times the fees at most NLUs.
That’s a large number of students willing to pay a large amount of annual fee every year.
Let me just say the secret of JGLS’s popularity (or success?) lies in the failure of NLUs. You have to read Shruti’s eye-opening story to fathom the kind of higher education shift India is witnessing.
Also, JGLS has done nothing but exposed the trick of the NLUs, i.e., highly privileged, and therefore, naturally competent students joined it, which raised the quality at NLUs. Now JGLS thought it can play that game as well. Fix high fees, get the most privileged bunch of people, and ride on the coat-tails of privileged background of students joining it and then start running around brandishing taking on the imaginary 'old guard'.
Paid or not, it's shoddy journalism for sure.
In addition, perhaps taking a bit of liberty with facts doesn't always help JGLS' case? Again, had it been a case of people trolling, like someone has done above by calling an individual faculty run journal of dubious quality as 'one of the best' from NUJS, then I wouldn't have brought this up. Trolls would troll. But this is a case of official university representatives putting up such matters. Even few years back, JGLS had put up on its official website a claim that it has got the best placements of all Indian law schools. When people started laughing and being derisive at the obvious falsehood, they hastily changed it to all Indian private law schools. This doesn't really help their cause and that's something they and you would have to understand.
Even in this year, JGLS seems to have had a very good placement scene. But calling it the best in the country is still not helping your cause, because it simply isn't. You can't place 10-20% of a batch and claim it to be the best. Not your fault, in absolute numbers the jobs surely are more than any individual NLU. Yet NLSIU was called the best not because it placed the most grads in numbers, but because anyone who studies there and wants a job would usually be placed. There is a huge difference.
If you want to claim your faculty to be the best in the country, then I do not have any objection as such. Other law schools also do the same. The metric is really subjective and the issue would never be resolved conclusively. Do remember though that a key factor of being a good teacher is the ability to produce good students. JGLS is producing good students even now. However, even the brightest JGLS students do not really show any obvious advantage over the brightest NLU students. Same goes for the average students out of these institutions. So clearly, the faculty aren't producing very different output in these cases, so claiming one set to be the best is always going to be challenged.
Your infra is obviously the best of all Indian law schools. People pay more for it and get the results on that front.
In the end, why not just be happy for your own institute and keep making it better than it used to be yesterday, instead of all these needless and meaningless comparisons? This is meant for all the people involved, whether from JGLS or from NLUs. I would have called the exercise and flexing juvenile, regardless of the fact that one institution's authority figures and not only students, are clearly fanning this absurdity for their own agenda.
Does Jindal not have a PR Team? Do they not repeatedly send out press releases and pursue relationships with journalists to push the "news" about the university? even if no one gets paid behind all this- at the very least I am saying that junior journalists often don't have the sense to ask tough questions and take a critical stance, they instead just reproduce whatever their interviewees say.
It's entirely possible that a few people in every jgls batch are smart and motivated and invested in their education. If you have 800 people you will have a few smart motivated people just because of random chance. But let us not kid ourselves, most of the students just don't work as hard as they should. They get jaded pretty fast and would rather pursue social relationships than taking their education seriously. Covid and online education made this even worse. I'm bored being a student here and not having intellectual stimulation tbh.
When have you seen Baxi on campus? I would really like to know? I haven't seen him. I haven't seen a lot of these "star faculty" people at all. There's clearly some dishonesty about how many people are actively teaching each semester and what that does to the student-faculty ratio right? In a university with a 1:10, 1:9 ratio, your class size for mandatory courses should not be more than 30 students- is that happening? For elective courses, you should have elective classes with 10-15 students working in a group- do we have that?
Have you looked at the faculty development policy? Do you know what their incentives are? they're to publish as much as possible in Scopus, not to publish serious impactful work that takes time. For every Saptarshi Mandal or Mohsin Alam or Oishik Sircar you have tens of AIs who don't know the basics of the subjects they're teaching and who publish nonsense. Pointing to the exception proves the rule tbh. Other universities also do scam- that doesnt make us not scam. get out of here with that whataboutery.
Of course a motivated good jindal student has all the opportunity in the world. OFCOURSE they have better opportunities than NLU students. They always did- they're wealthier, they're paying at least 4 times more fees, and money gets you a lot of things at JGLS. But let's talk about exposure. Exposure to what? To America? England? Or rootedness in our own country and the problems of our own people? How many people on campus even know or care about caste? even understand poverty or hunger? how many students can even name all the seven states in the north east of the country or point to vidarbha on a map or name the MP from sonipat? we live in a bubble. If you don't face it you can't burst it.
How many students on campus really don't know much law, get by with hooliganism and doing the very basics and essentially promotion because professors are discouraged from failing people? how many students on campus dont get jobs or only get them because of their contacts/ family?
If we keep telling others the big lie that everything is hunky dory, we will believe it ourselves and we will be worse off for it.
As far as "serious scholarship" goes, do you mean to say Upendra Baxi and the likes of him are not serious scholars? That Jindal has a stellar faculty is a well-stablished fact at this point even among the NLU-ite trolls on LI. Apart from the obvious eminent scholars whose work needs no introduction, faculty at Jindal is generally internationally published (and/or Oxford/Cambridge/Ivy League educated) and even cited by the Supreme Court (eg. Saptarshi Mandal cited in the homosexuality judgment). Student research also spans across all top journals (feel free to go view past issues) as well as International publications, with the Jindal Global Law Review being one of the handful of SCOPUS-indexed law journals in India.
Whether you like it or not, the fact remains: a good student at Jindal has far greater exposure and resources to exploit than a good student at an NLU (which is to say, far greater faculty, infrastructure, networking opportunities, diversity in the knowledge taught for eg. 200+ elective options per sem, and also a rapidly growing alumni base across law firms), of course, given that he/she has the drive and motivation to utilise the resources at his/her disposal which is what I mean when I say "good student".
JGLS has also consistently outperformed NLUs in QS. Only 1 NLU (NLSIU) even makes it to QS. 😂
The only spaces where JGLS trails are:
👉 NIRF ranking: but then NLU people posting here themselves diss NIRF, barring NLSIU and NLUD people. 😂
👉Jessup and Vienna moot wins: but AFAIK only 1 NLU (NLSIU) has won Jessup and 1 has won Vienna (NUJS). JGLS has come second in Vienna, so not too far behind. JGLS has also won many other prestigious international moots.
👉 Rhodes scholarships: Agreed that JGLS needs to do better here, but JGLS alumni have got every other prestigious scholarship: Fulbright, Gates, Chevening, Commonwealth etc. 💪 And it's not that other NLUs are brimming with Rhodes scholars. Other than NLSIU, no other NLU has more than 5 AFAIK.
This number is going to be at max 125- 150 out of 500
There’s not much remarkable about your graduate outcomes when kids just go to work for papa. That’s not a reflection of how employable your students are. Just stop. No one is buying it.
How a private law school took on the old guard in India
OP Jindal Global University’s law school charges the highest fees, but still attracts students in droves. It’s now a worthy rival to India’s reputed National Law Universities
Jindal Global Law School (JGLS) caused quite a stir earlier in August when it said 103 candidates from the current batch of about 500 students had secured job offers in the first round of placements.
The biggest recruiters were some of India’s best-paying and most sought-after law firms, such as Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas (CAM), AZB & Partners, Indus Law, Khaitan & Co, Saraf & Partners, Trilegal, and Veritas Legal.
CAM, India’s largest law firm, alone onboarded 44 candidates. People had to take note.
“A tier-1 law firm hiring those many from a single college… the numbers are unheard of,” an associate working at CAM tells The Ken. To put things into perspective, in 2020 [when the associate joined], CAM hired about 70 people through campus placements and pre-placement offers.
CAM is just one of the many law firms that have ramped up hiring from JGLS in the last few years. Interestingly, it doesn’t hire that many candidates from many National Law Universities (NLUs) in the country or older rivals of JGLS—Symbiosis Law School and Amity Law School.
“JGLS wasn’t taken very seriously in its early years, but the quality of education and faculty made all the difference. In the last few years, recruitments (from the school) have shot up,” says Akanksha Antil, founder of legal talent management firm To Whom It May Concern and former head of talent management at CAM.
Set up in 2009 by the steel and power business tycoon Naveen Jindal, JGLS was the first school established under O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU) in Sonipat, a city 35km north of New Delhi.
Last year, JGU broke into the top 500 universities in the QS Graduate Employability Rankings, which assesses universities’ ability to produce graduates with the skills required for the workforce. JGU is the only Indian university focused on the social sciences to be featured in these rankings.
Like Naveen Jindal, several business leaders have entered the space recently. There’s Haryana-based BML Munjal University, named after the man who founded the Hero Group; Mahindra University in the southern Indian state of Telangana; and the Times Group-owned Bennett University in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The Indian Institute of Management Rohtak, an hour’s drive from JGU, has also thrown its hat in the ring by announcing a five-year integrated programme in law.
There are over 1,500 private law colleges and 23 NLUs in India.
AUTHOR
Shruti Sonal
Shruti is a Delhi-based reporter who looks at India's clean energy ecosystem through the lens of the intersection between businesses, policy and environment. She has previously worked with Reuters and Outlook Business.
Industrial houses buying media companies may be a recent trend, but their interest in universities is a feature of the last decade.
I distinctly remember a meeting with an Indian-born professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was December 2008, and I was visiting Boston for work. The professor, the head of a department I shall not name, said many Indian business tycoons had been visiting him at MIT to seek his help (and support) in setting up private universities in India.
The visibly perplexed professor told me that he had declined those requests. I was reminded of that conversation when I read Shruti’s story today. It’s a conspicuous example of that unfolding trend.
Set up in 2009 by the steel and power industrialist Naveen Jindal, Jindal Global Law School (JGLS) was the first school established under O.P. Jindal Global University in Sonipat, a city 35km north of New Delhi.
Today, it’s the most sought-after law school in India. This month, JGLS published a note saying it had placed 103 (out of about 500 students in the current batch) in the first round of placements itself. Cyril Amardas Mangalchand, India’s largest law firm, alone onboarded 44 candidates.
How can you not take note?
There are over 1,500 private law colleges and 23 National Law Universities (NLUs) in India. Yet, JGLS takes in the highest number of students, at about 900 per year. It charges the most, too. For the five-year B.A. LLB (Honours), students pay nearly Rs 8 lakh (US$10,000) per annum, nearly three times the fees at most NLUs.
That’s a large number of students willing to pay a large amount of annual fee every year.
Let me just say the secret of JGLS’s popularity (or success?) lies in the failure of NLUs. You have to read Shruti’s eye-opening story to fathom the kind of higher education shift India is witnessing.
Full article on - https://the-ken.com/story/how-a-private-law-school-took-on-the-old-guard-in-india/ (9-minute read)