Ques: The IDIA project which you initiated a few months back has taken off in several states in order to bring in more diversity to the elitist homogenous environment of most law schools and thereby contributing in the long term to an increasingly diverse legal profession as well. What drove you to start this project?

Ans: It’s a couple of factors. The first factor was that I studied at one of these law schools and when I studied there we had a sliding fees structure which you paid according to your means, so I ended up paying Rs. 5000 a month and some of my classmates paid about Rs. 25,000 a month as that was the income slab. Because of this a lot of people who may not have been able to afford the fees today, could have secure admission. Over the years, at the national law schools, the fees structure went up. It became uniform, so everyone at NUJS now pays Rs. 1.8 lakhs a year, NLS is about Rs. 1.5 lakhs a year, Nalsar and all the others are Ts. 1.5 lakhs plus and so as a result of this high fees and a variety of other factors that I will come into in a while, I noticed personally, having been a student at one of the National Law schools and now, teaching at one of the national law schools, that the composition has changed.

The composition has changed in ways that I think are detrimental to the future of education in India, because what we see are relatively a homogenous mixture of people coming in. Similar background means, similar ways of thinking and also very problematically and inability to appreciate differences and to live with differences. So when you see a lot of people who think similar to you, who have grown up with similar backgrounds, you get very comfortable in that zone and then you don’t like anyone else who comes in and upsets that. So you want people to transform to your way of thinking to your way of life and that plays out in several ways. For example, at NUJS we did a survey and maybe one or two students in the incoming first year batch last year, were from rural backgrounds and vernacular medium school backgrounds who studied in vernacular medium schools. When these students take admission, they face a very difficult problem and we did a survey on that as well and we asked people to tell us if they face any kind of fitting in problems because of their background. Then a lot of people came back with comments saying that because they didn’t speak the right kind of English and because they didn’t wear the right kind of clothes, they had problems with people.

You give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a life time. So , the purpose of these law schools was to produce social engineers, people who could go and transform society and take up the cause of the under privileged, the disadvantaged sections, and fight on their behalf and give them a better life. So we said that, rather than us doing, I mean, we should do it, definitely, but wont it be better if we gave the tools in their hands so we pick representatives from these communities who have an aptitude for the law; train them, bring them into the law schools and give them the tools and then the hope is that they would then go and better the law of their communities and that would empower their communities. So that’s the real second reason and a very important reason that we want to increase access to legal education so that we end up empowering disadvantageous communities, by giving them tools, in the form of good education because law is a very powerful instrument, you can use it to change a lot.

Ques: Can you tell us the progress of the IDIA project and what are the difficulties if any, that you are facing while implementing the project?

Ans: We started this at a very small scale at NUJS. We started by visiting the Government school in Sikkim, very randomly and its been an organic growth, so to speak, we’re learning as we go along and now its coming together much better. So once we did the school in Sikkim, we went there and we spoke to the students and I just randomly walked in, spoke to the teachers and we asked if there were any people interested in law. So they said, not really, you’d be wasting your time here. So we said, ok, can we speak to the students. They said sure. We spoke to a class of about 200 students out of which just one was interested in law, before we started our talk. Then I spoke to them on law, on the potential for different kinds of career options of law, you can litigate, you can join a law firm, you can join an international institution, you can work for the benefit of society, you can work at an NGO, so I told them of immediate possibilities you can do over there and then immediately, out of 200 students, 170 wanted to do law and we picked about 8 of those students, because we cant train everyone.

These 8 students were picked on the basis of a very simple logical reasoning test where they had to have some assemblance of logical and reasoning aptitude and some aptitutde for the study of law as law is nothing but logic. Thus we test students on their logical skills and once we get an idea as to which students are likely to do well and have an aptitude, we take them. In Sikkim almost everyone was under the income levels that we had in mind, all of them were from very poor families, and now we’re putting them through a very rigourous programme. So we had a two hour, three hour training session with these 8 students. We brought them to Calcutta, we did another 3 day training session with them here, teaching them legal reasoning, logical reasoning and all the components that come as far as CLAT is concerned, because unless they pass CLAT they cant come to these law schools. Thus Sikkim was over and now we’re training children from the Sundarbans, which is far more difficult, because these students speak mainly Bengali with English being their second language. CLAT requires a strong component of English. Hence, we are training them but we don’t have much time cause they have to write the exam in May.

We encouraged all the other law schools in other states to pick this up. Bangalore is doing very well. The Bangalore chapter went to atleast 6 schools, in and around Bangalore and they picked about 20 students already and they’re being trained as well .The Kerela chapter went to about 5 schools, picked students and they’ll be put on this programme soon. Similarly a team from NUJS went and spoke and collaborated with NALSAR which is a Hyderabd law school and they went to a blind school in Hyderabad and they picked 5 students. Again, we’re going to Hyderabad at the end of two-three weeks and we’ll start the training programme with the blind children after getting them material in accessible format. Since they’re visually impaired, we’re going to get audio recordings and other visual material and then go and start the training sessions.

In all the other states, teams have been formed, some of them have visited schools, picked students and over time we hope that across India, we have a small team job training everywhere going to small towns, villages and other places and picking out children. Right now our main marker for picking students is economic background. Are they below certain income? We look at their parents’ combined income to see if they earn less than Rs.15, 000 to 20,000 per month. I mean, that’s the main marker that we go by now and disabilities. i.e. disabled people. These two are our main criteria right now for selecting students. Next year onwards we hope to expand further.

Ques: How do you see the impact of this noble cause initiated by you five years down the line?

Ans: The hope is that 5 years down the line, more students would come in and more students coming in would mean that all the communities would be represented. We have our first batch right now and, 5 years from now we’ll have, assuming that we’re lucky and some people come in next year, they would have graduated so we’ll have an idea of how these students do in law schools. We pick students based on logical aptitude. Their English may be weak, but their logic may be extremely strong. So we have to make sure that they continue training in English even once they come into law school and the hope is that they would do well. But we’ll have to see in 5 years, how well they do in the law school. So then accordingly, we can structure our programme and change it depending on what we find, in terms of their own experience at these law schools.

5 years , my own guess, would be, too short a time to really have any great impact, apart from just getting in more awareness, because in 5 years, I think, a lot more schools’ would know about this. A lot more rural areas, small towns, other people would know that law schools are there, that they have a chance at these law schools, that they are being provided training, that they would get scholarships once they come in, so that sensitization, I think, will have a great impact. In 10 years we’re hoping that once a lot of students come in, the very composition of these law schools would begin to change and once the composition changes, then there is no problem. People learn to live with differences and there will be no fitting in problem and I think students would be educated in a much better environment, understanding and appreciating what real India is all about and hopefully, over this time, a lot more students would be involved in the project and the benefit of this project which is to imbibe in the students some values that we aspire to.

So we can’t teach values in classrooms, but we can only do the project. So a student working on the ground, on a project like this, will experience first hand, what it is like, to help in this noble cause and once they get that feeling, I think it stays with them and is imparted what we think is, good values to the students as they study law, as they go out into the world and they try and use their legal education to help society.

Ques: Do you feel lawyers and law firms need to play a bigger and more responsible role in order to successfully implement this project?

Ans: Of course, we’re hoping that they play a much bigger role because this will change the constitution of the legal profession. Also if we get more candidates from these disadvantaged backgrounds into the law schools and hopefully get them out into the market, then, these premier lawyers that we generate through these law schools, will change the composition at the higher levels of the legal profession also to open it. So I think its going to benefit the profession in a great way and as the saying goes, the secretary to the PM said that “einstiens are in the village” and we’ll change it and say “our palkhiwalas are in the village”. So once you pick out these very extremely bright kids and bring them on board, it will certainly be a great boast to the legal profession that we’re getting such fantastic minds, from areas that have never been represented in this way at the higher levels of the legal profession.