Breaking: NUALS agrees to constitute Grievance Redressal Committee to deal with CLAT complaints

The National University of Advanced Legal Studies (NUALS) has agreed to constitute a grievance redressal committee to deal with complaints against Common Law Admission Test 2018 (CLAT).

The readiness of NUALS to take this measure was conveyed to the Supreme Court by Senior Advocate Rakesh Munjal and advocate A Karthik who appeared for the University.

The Committee will consist of two members – retired Kerala High Court judge, Justice MR Hariharan Nair and Head of Computer Science Department of Cochin University, Dr. Santosh Kumar G.

This committee will examine all the complaints of individual CLAT candidates and make recommendations.

The scrutiny will be done in two phases. Complaints received till May 23 will be considered in the first phase and a report on the same will be submitted to the Court on May 30.

Complaints received after May 23 will be considered in the second phase. The last date for filing a complaint will be May 27, 7 pm.

The Court requested NUALS to try and submit the report on the second phase of complaints also by May 30.

A designated email id will be created by the University to receive complaints and the same will be notified on the CLAT website. NUALS also stated that it will endeavour to acknowledge each complaint it receives.

The matter will now be taken up on May 30. The stay on proceedings in various High Courts will continue.

These submissions were made in a petition filed by six CLAT candidates challenging CLAT 2018 and seeking a re-examination.

CLAT 2018 was conducted by NUALS on May 13 with the aid and assistance of a private company, M/s Sify Technologies Ltd.

The petitioners have sought quashing of the same and have prayed for holding fresh examination.

It is their case that manner in which the examination was held “has jeopardized the future of thousands of students who appeared for this examination”.

They have submitted students across various States faced serious problems in almost 200 Online examination centres. The problems included power cuts, failure of log-in system, slow biometric verification, blank screens, substantial loss of time in system log-ins, frequent resetting of computer systems, hanging of computer systems, server shutdown and difficulties in moving from one question to another.

These difficulties led to significant loss of time (averaging about 5-30 minutes from student to student) which has totally vitiated the very essence of an online competitive exam of 120 minutes wherein a student is expected to answer 200 questions, the petition states.

After hearing the parties yesterday, the Court had urged NUALS to come up with a “wholesome solution” to redress the complaints against CLAT 2018. Justice AM Khanwilkar had asked NUALS to make suggestions to resolve the issue and to ascertain if a forum/ body can be set up to look into the issues raised by the candidates.

Read the suggestion made by NUALS to the Supreme Court

Read the order below.