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Court has sought response from the Consortium of National Law Universities, Bar Council of India and Centre in PIL to conduct CLAT 2024 in English and Regional Languages.
The Delhi High Court on Wednesday issued notice in Public Interest Litigation (PIL) to conduct the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) 2024 in English and other Regional Languages as mentioned in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India.
The Division Bench of Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Subramonium Prasad issued notices to the Consortium of National Law Universities, Bar Council of India and the Centre through the Ministry of Education in the petition and asked for their replies within four weeks and listed the matter for hearing on May 19.
The exam is scheduled to be held in December this year.
The petition has been moved by one Sudhanshu Pathak who is a law student at Delhi University. He was represented by Senior Advocate Jayant Mehta along with Advocates Akash Vajpai and Sakshi Raghav.
The petition stated that English-medium schools get an advantage over their peers belonging to schools operating in Hindi or other vernacular languages and in a hyper-competitive paper like CLAT, they are linguistically disempowered as they have to surpass the additional hurdle of learning and mastering a new language. Hence, CLAT fails to provide a level playing field to the students belonging to educational backgrounds rooted in regional languages.
The petitioner also placed reliance on a recent survey conducted by IDIA Trust indicating that over 95% of the surveyed students came from schools where the medium of instruction was English, both at the secondary and higher secondary level.
“New Education Policy, 2020 and Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 require mother tongue to be the medium of instruction in schools and higher education institutions, it is unfortunate that English as the only medium of CLAT-(UG) is depriving a huge portion of the students of opting for the law ( 5 years LLB) as a course of study, who have studied in their regional or native languages,” the petition stated.
It has been stated in the petition that the practice of conducting CLAT (UG) only in English has an element of arbitrariness and discrimination and hence is violative of Articles 14 and 29(2) of the Constitution of India.
Case Title: Sudhanshu Pathak v Consortium of National Law Universities Through Secretary & Ors.
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