New Delhi: The Supreme Court Wednesday directed the Ministry of Human Resource and Development (HRD) to convene a meeting to find out best solutions to mitigate hindrances in common law admission test (CLAT).
A three-judge bench of the apex court comprising Justice SA Bobde, Justice L Nageswara Rao and Justice R Subhash Reddy asked the HRD ministry to convene a meeting of the petitioner, representative of CLAT, national testing agency and Bar Council of India to see what is the best solution which can be achieved.
The bench was of the opinion that the national testing agency be assigned to conduct CLAT.
The apex court order has come at a time when the National Law University (NLU) Odisha has been assigned to conduct the CLAT examination next year. As per the official notification by NLU, CLAT 2019 will be conducted May 12.
The vice-chancellor of NLU Odisha, Prof (Dr) Srikrishna Deva Rao, was also present in the court Wednesday.
A petition was filed in 2015 by Prof Shamnad Basheer, a legal scholar, pleading that a robust, structured and institutionalised mechanism for conducting CLAT to avoid uncertainties and to reduce the scope for errors and lapses be set up.
He had contended in the petition that despite the growing popularity of CLAT, its planning and execution over the years has been marred with serious institutional lapses and inefficiencies, such as arbitrary and sub-standard question papers, incorrect questions and answers, questions that have no reasonable nexus to a candidate’s aptitude for the study of law, wrongful allotments of seats, unnecessary delays and an opaque administration that fails to comply with basic standards of transparency and the norms underlying the RTI Act.
The petitioner had pleaded that a permanent authority should be there to conduct CLAT examination.
The responsibility to conduct CLAT is delegated to one of the NLUs every year.
In 2018, the National University of Advanced Legal Studies, Kochi had conducted the CLAT. According to reports, the Kochi institution failed to rise to the occasion. The entrance examination was conducted at several centres across the country May 13. It was reportedly marred by a number of technical and infrastructural glitches. Immediately after the examination, a number of students described their two hours in the examination hall as nothing but a nightmare. And the number of such complaints increased as the days went by.
The court posted the next hearing after four weeks.