The Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access (IDIA) initiative, which aims to help students from non-traditional lawyer backgrounds to apply to national law schools, has fund-raised Rs 72 lakhs at an event in Delhi on Saturday attended by 150.
IDIA founder Shamnad Basheer said that donors had pledged Rs 12 lakh in donations, which would be used to support the ongoing activites of IDIA.
On top of that, three lawyers had committed to fund the tuition fees for four IDIA scholars' five-year degrees, each running to Rs 3 lakhs per year, at an aggregate five-year cost of Rs 60 lakh.
Supporters will be able to choose scholars to sponsor from a pool selected by IDIA.
Basheer said that IDIA's first annual conference, held at NLU Delhi during the day and at the Constitutional Club in the evening for an awards ceremony, hosted some very interesting discussion and participation.
Dr G Mohan Gopal, director of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies, held a "pretty provocative address", explained Basheer. "He said, you [IDIA] should aim to be redundant, which is actually fabulous."
"It is an interesting sentiment that your larger vision should be to be redundant and, more importantly, the model as it stands now is about one-sided help to the scholars, but it should also be about what scholars can teach you because they come from communities [with things to share]."
Basheer said that IDIA had already tried to incorporate "learning from the entire group" into its programme but would do more of this.
Around 150 lawyers, academics and supporters attended the event, said Basheer, including managing partners from India's largest law firms, in-house counsel, and academics.
At a function in the evening, IDIA also awarded prizes to IDIA supporters and singled out scholars for recognition as CHAMPS - an acronym for fostering lawyers who are "creative", "holistic", altruistic", "mavericks" and "problem solvers".
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They do have lots of information on their website:
idialaw.com/
And we've written about IDIA a fair bit in the past too under the following tags:
www.legallyindia.com/tag/idia
www.legallyindia.com/tag/increasing-diversity-by-increasing-access-idia
Your tone in last sentence. I don't likes.
As IDIA is constrained by the age-limits that the National Law Universities impose for those who write the entrance exams, we cannot choose most 'mothers, any older people, anyone with working class experience'.
IDIA does choose youngsters from lower strata which we deem worthy of assistance. If you may explain why lower strata has been put in quotes, we'll be glad to clarify what exactly your concern is.
Basically, while much of IDIA's work seems laudable, it is playing a very small game, which is an occasion for sadness when such otherwise interesting people are involved in it. This seems like a JNU sort of project. Very timid, ideological, and ultimately, very safe.
Your phrase says a lot: "IDIA does choose youngsters from the lower start we deem worthy of assistance." That phrase has more than a whiff of class arrogance about it - how nice of you to reach down and help those less fortunate! One has to do one's best, after all, no?
There are plenty of well established organizations, such as Rotary or the Lions, who very effectively dole out and monitor expenditure on education for the very people you are targeting. If IDIA leveraged these existing organizations they could easily reach a very broad sample of the population they hope to target, and not have to reinvent the wheel. IDIA couldl provide tutoring and other guidance while the Rotary or Lions could provide the network for reaching candidates, auditing fund dispersal and monitoring progress, none of which IDIA is likely to do as well compared with a mature and time-tested organization.
So this strikes me as a very narrow, pedestrian way for a few "leading lights" to work off their noblesse oblige. One can acknowledge and applaud whatever good they will accomplish while also noting that the profession has yet to produce a movement for genuine, broad-based diversity in the law school population.
These are good questions and some that we are asked often by our supporters as well as people who do not have much information about the scholars we have picked so far or are in the process of training. Allow me to first address your question on what we consider as diversity and how we aim to foster it.
When we speak about diversity in law schools and work towards bringing a set of candidates who would help increase diversity, we consider the economic disadvantage to be the primary consideration(since that is the single largest access bottleneck to law schools). However, most of our students are also socially disadvantaged by virtue of hailing from communities that have been historically and socially marginalized i.e. Sc's and St's, the differently-abled. The diversity component is further enhanced by the fact that these students hail from some of the most disconnected and remote parts of the states that they represent - Sunderbans in West Bengal, Gudemaranahalli in Karnataka, villages in Machhilipatnam, Kurnool and Nellore in Andhra Pradesh, Rae Bareily in Uttar Pradesh, Phagwara in Punjab, Barmer in Rajasthan, Pitij in Jharkhand, Chhinga Weng in Mizoram, Kollam in Kerala and L. Gamnom in Manipur. You would know that students in remote areas have extremely limited access to information about viable career options or even higher education opportunities as such and therefore, lack of access to information is another bottleneck that we try to address. Most of our scholars belong to families run by farmers, quarry workers, roadside tea and newspaper vendors, clerks, drivers and pani puri karts etc. Please do visit our website to catch a glimpse of the detailed profiles of these students.
To be 'fund worthy' therefore, a candidate has to demonstrate economic disadvantage as the foremost criteria and that coupled with aptitude for law and/or any other experience/condition that makes him/her socially disadvantaged. Essentially the child should, by virtue of the gender, place of birth, social position, economic ability, life experience etc enhance diversity in the classroom he/she eventually attends in future.
Age Bar and the IDIA pool of scholars: While we have, at several forums and at every opportunity that we had, recorded our protests against the age bar mandated under CLAT, you would appreciate that it is ultimately the CLAT Committee that alone decides on the policies, unless one approaches the court to challenge the policy and decide on the matter. So long as the age bar remains, we have to prepare our scholars who have crossed the upper limit of age, for other leading law colleges, such as GLC, ILS, IP University and sometimes even 3 year law courses. One such scholar is above 21, a mother of a child who is differently abled and supports the family by working as a domestic help. She is being trained by us to appear for law entrance examinations that she is eligible to appear for. I am not very sure about what you mean by 'working class experience' but we support scholars who were previously working as newspaper vendor, domestic help, courier delivery boy, data entry agent at truck loading stations. And we are extremely proud that each of them have, through immense hard work and grit, secured seats at the various national law schools in India.
As we move forward, we are trying to address all aspects of diversity in the best possible manner and striving to bring those meritorious students into law schools who would have otherwise never had the opportunity or means to attend one. Hoping that you would connect us to such students in case you do know anyone worthy of our support and help us spread the word about our objectives.
Thanks for taking out so much time to ponder over these issues and engage with us in a fruitful discussion.
If they simply tweak the inflow filtered through a discriminatory system, they will not have done much at all. But of course, they are at least "doing something." Unfortunately, that counts for bold thinking in today's scene.
The money raised is not actually 72 lakhs, though it would have been absolutely brilliant had it been so. It actually includes the total amount pledged by people in an informal capacity as student scholarships in the future years. Hopefully most of them will materialize to help scholars in the future years. Considering each NLU student requires approximately 3 lakhs annually and IDIA supports over 40 students now, with an addition of 10 nearly every year, the amount is not much though. Hopefully more and more people will extend their support to this great cause.
About the age limit, IDIA can only help those whom the law schools won't actually disqualify on grounds apart from merit or economy. Having said that, at least one student being trained is a young mother and domestic help, so obviously they don't close doors on anyone who is willing to strive hard.
Personally, I don't see what's so bad about it - would love people to explain if they actually have a cogent argument.
Is there an issue with the current demographic mix of undergrad students entering the law?
Are there any other initiatives that try to address this problem?
I remember that there are a bunch of schemes in the UK with similar aims at several different levels. One for instance, encourages students from non-top universities to apply to law firms, etc, since kids at OxBridge and other top unis tend to have a massive public school bias (public, weirdly, meaning 'private' in the UK) and get ignored by most recruiters.
Likewise, most top universities also have at least one programme to encourage kids from state schools (i.e., non-private schools) to apply to Oxford to try and address the imbalance. And I'm sure there are a bunch of national schemes too.
I think every initiative is obviously limited in what it can achieve, but you need to set yourself boundaries and realistic targets also so that at least you can achieve what you set out and not succumb to mission creep.
That said, what IDIA is trying to achieve seems worthwhile.
I think what really needs to happen though is that colleges waive at least some of the fees or establish their own scholarships so that meeting IDIA scholars' fees isn't contingent on IDIA going around with a begging bowl every year, which can't be sustainable if it's scaled... Not sure if NLSes are allowed to do that under their governing statutes?
Sounds like a really Dazed and Confused comment!
It is easy to sit on a high chair and pass comments. Ask your maid servant what she will do if she has extra money. She will say that she will use it for her child's education. Ask your night watchman why he works in two shifts. He will also say that he wants to educate his children. Effectively, IDIA is not just helping children but their parents also.
Quoting Dazed and Confused:
Quoting IDEA:
On Legally India, yes, we write about IDIA often for obvious reasons: it's an NGO started by lawyers for lawyers rather recently, and it seems to be doing good work and readers seem to be reading it.
If your worst criticism of IDIA is that it receives too much limelight then you are, possibly intentionally, missing the fire and only seeing the smoke (if that works as a metaphor)?
If you cannot support IDIA, and you want to oppose IDIA / level allegations against it...at least substantiate
If you were present at the IDIA Delhi Conference, you would have noticed that law firm partners, senior lawyers and even judges were addressed by children from marginalized economic background. Some of these IDIA scholars were disabled. How many times have you seen such things happen? How such scholars will get to tell their stories to the who's who of the legal fraternity? I have never seen it happen before. We need our scholars to rub shoulders with the top people in the sector so that they understand what they can make out of themselves. At the same time, we need the law firm partners, senior lawyers and judges to hear about the ground realities from the people who know about it from their personal experiences. These events also help in creating awareness. I remember, a top firm partner asked us how they can make their office disabled friendly and a visually impaired IDIA scholar told him what they had to do.
IDIA runs on the contributions made by the people. While NLU Delhi did not charge a dime for holding the conference, the tab for the evening event was picked up by one of the donors. The conference also helped us raise some funds for the future IDIA scholars. We also help our all scholars in getting government and private scholarship. You can confirm the same with any of our 40+ scholars in the various law schools across this country. We need such events to reach out to more people so that we can contribute more. I understand that some of you feel that we can do more. I agree with you completely. But to do that, we need more hands. I urge all of you to help us out. I can assure you that together, we will me a more effective organisation.
Thanks.
Kian - any thoughts?
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