The clash of engineering (IIT) and medical (PMT) entrances, on 8 May, with CLAT 2016 pulled potential CLAT applicants away to the more popular entrances.

Marginally fewer applicants than last year are competing for more undergraduate seats this year, despite Indian Institute of Technology’s (IIT) recently hiking their fees by more than 100 per cent from the original Rs 90,000.

Several NLUs, such as GNLU Gandhinagar, Nalsar Hyderabad, NLIU Bhopal and others also charge nearly Rs 2 lakh upward (Read Legally India’s full report on NLU fees from 2015).

Prof Paramjit Jaswal, the vice chancellor of CLAT 2016 convenor RGNUL Patiala, told Legally India today that CLAT 2016, for which registration is now closed, received 45,000 applications, around 5,500 of which were from LLM candidates (“or 20 or 30 applications less or more”, he said).

This leaves around 39,500 LLB candidates competing for 2,179 seats across 18 national law universities (NLUs). That figure is marginally below last year’s 39,686 who competed for 1,700 LLB seats.

CLAT 2015 experienced the most significant bump in applications in recent years – a 20 per cent hike from 31,231 CLAT 2014 applications – but the conduct of the exam by the convenor RMLNLU Lucknow was widely perceived as a debacle, with errors in questions, marking and repeated delays in final results.

CLAT seats