The student councils of NLSIU Bangalore, Nalsar Hyderabad and NUJS Kolkata have jointly condemned the state of affairs at NLIU Bhopal that has led to students there protesting against the administration for several days now.

The joint statement reads, including a hashtag of #NationaliseNLUs:

The events transpiring at National Law Institute University, Bhopal (NLIU) in the last few days are greatly distressing. Our support goes out to the students of NLIU who are standing up for fairness and transparency, thereby rejecting administrative arbitrariness and compromises caused by regional interference. The students’ demands are basic, reasonable and completely justified. The alleged acts of the administration, on the other hand, are both discriminatory and reprehensible. Such a state of affairs is highly unbecoming of a premier national institution such as NLIU.

Most of their grievances yet again highlight the common systematic problems that plague National Law Universities (NLUs) presently. Due to their centralized nature and administrative opacity, NLUs have been unable to cope up with evolving global standards of learning and administration.

We, the student bodies of NLSIU, NALSAR and NUJS, have already demanded the status of Institutes of National Importance for NLUs. As NLUs struggle for due importance vis-à-vis comparable institutions of other disciplines, nationalization will enable them to untap their full potential. In absence of uniform academic standards and centralized funding, the disparity within different NLUs themselves is a problem to be reckoned with. Centralization in administration through nationalization of these institutions is the only long-term solution to this problem.

Failure to do so might disrupt entirely the next generation of social-engineers that the National Law School Project was destined to create when it was set up three decades back by Prof. Madhav Menon.

We, the students of NLSIU, NALSAR and NUJS, stand in complete solidarity with our counterparts at NLIU. We respect their courage and sincerely hope it inspires the law school community to stand up against unjust and regressive administration of its future. We look forward to the urgent redressal of their immediate grievances.