Pleas against CLAT: Top court seeks solution to complaints

New Delhi, May 24

The Supreme Court on Thursday asked the National University of Advanced Legal Studies (NUALS) to come up on Friday with a “wholesome solution” to the complaints of inconsistencies in the May 13 Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) for admission to prestigious national law schools.

NUALS, with the aid of private firm M/s Sify Technologies Limited, conducted CLAT-2018 on May 13 for admissions to undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in law at premier law schools, the results of which are expected to be declared on May 31.

Several pleas have been filed in high courts and in the apex court seeking quashing of the CLAT and re-test alleging inconsistencies during the test. A Vacation Bench of Justices AM Khanwilkar and Navin Sinha on Thursday restrained all high courts from entertaining any fresh plea and hearing pending ones on the issue.

The Bench then asked NUALS to apprise it about the grievance-redressal mechanism, if any, to deal with the 251 complaints by candidates and said there has to be a system in place to look into them.

“If such a dispute arises, is there any mechanism where these cases can be looked into and addressed so that candidates could go satisfied,” it asked while directing NUALS to come up with a “wholesome solution” by Friday. “There should be some forum where the factual aspects can be looked into. Case to case questions will have to be looked into. They (NUALS) can appoint some authority to look into the case to case aspects and that will ease a lot of problems,” it said. — PTI