Updated on: Tuesday, August 04, 2015
To strengthen the legal education system in our country, the Ministry of Law and Justice and the Bar Council of India (BCI) has permitted to set up 64 new law colleges, for the year 2015-2016. The 64 law colleges given permission were from over a 116 requests from various states. These colleges have been granted affiliation, keeping in mind the Supreme Court's order on checking fake varsities before giving permission for admissions.
BCI had earlier informed Delhi University's Faculty of Law college of not submitting required papers to renew its affiliation due to which its recent graduates were no longer eligible to be enrolled as advocates by the BCI. Similar kind of warning letters were also sent to nearly 70 other law colleges and universities.
BCI has set up its education rules, according to its rules all the law colleges should be inspected by the council to ensure that the 2008 Legal Education Rules are followed by the law colleges. In an announcement, BCI has said that if the colleges do not apply for inspection, their students will not be eligible for enrolment by state bar councils.
For the current academic year, BCI received 116 applications, out of which 79 applications were considered for inspection, 72 were verified and 64 applications were given approval. Official reports of last year states that BCI affiliated 92 new law colleges last year, which is nearly equal to double the number of new colleges that got affiliated in the entire 2012-2013. The total number of law colleges in India has seen a significant increase from just 1,200 in 2012-13 to 2,000 till 2014.