The Delhi high court in its earlier notices said that it is unfortunate that English, as the only medium of CLAT-(UG), is depriving a huge portion of the students, who have studied in their regional or native languages, of the opportunity to opt for a 5-year LLB course.
Delhi high court has asked the consortium of National Law Universities that if medical and engineering exams can be conducted in the regional languages then why not Common Law Admission Test (CLAT), which is held in English language only, can also be conducted in regional languages.
While CLAT-2024 is scheduled to take place in December 2023, the court has granted four weeks to the consortium to file its response to a petition seeking conduct of CLAT-2024 not only in English but also regional languages.
The petitioner represented through lawyers Akash Vajpai and Sakshi Raghav, said, “In a hyper-competitive paper, they (students from non-English language background) are linguistically disempowered as they have to surpass the additional hurdle of learning and mastering a new language."
“Naturally, aspirants belonging to English-medium schools have an advantage over their peers belonging to schools operating in Hindi or other vernacular languages. The underprivileged and disempowered aspirants can never view an exam solely based in English as obvious’ unlike their privileged, English-speaking competitors.”
A bench of Justices Satish Chandra Sharma and Subramonium Prasad said there are experts who translate papers of NEET in regional languages, then “why can’t we have these papers (CLAT) translated in regional languages?,” as reported by India.com.
“If medical education can be taught in Hindi, if the entrance examination for MBBS can be held in Hindi, JEE can be held in Hindi, what is this you are talking about,” the bench said, adding even AIBE (All India Bar Examination) is also held in Hindi.
The counsel for the consortium said the body was not taking the plea as adversarial, and it was in agreement that the examination should also be held in other languages. “The idea is definitely to make it more inclusive. The only concern is that we have to have necessary linguistic experts with legal knowledge,” he said.
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