SC for workable solutions to complaints of candidates in CLAT

The Supreme Court on Thursday favoured "workable and wholesome" solutions to complaints made by candidates to the Common Law Admission Test 2018 (CLAT) held on May 13.

A bench of justices A M Khanwilkar and Navin Sinha asked National University of Advanced Legal Studies (NUALS), Kochi, which conducted the tests, to explore the possibilities of redressing the grievances of the candidates.

"Were there some glitches in the examinations? Some committee has to be there. There must be some forum and some nodal agency. There are factual aspects, which can be gone into, and report may be provided to the candidates," the bench said.

The court asked senior advocate V Giri and advocate A Karthik to respond by Friday to its suggestions as the CLAT faced legal challenges in the form of multiple writ petitions in various high courts as well as the top court of the country.

Giri submitted that only seven petitions have been filed, while as many as 54,464 candidates appeared in the examinations at more than 250 centres in 65 cities.

More than 250 complaints and representations were sent to the institute complaining about technical glitches.

The counsel also furnished an audit report on those complaints, detailing the hurdles faced by the candidates, logging in and out times and allocations of extra time during the tests.

The court, however, asked the high courts of Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Bombay, Punjab and Haryana and Rajasthan not to proceed in the matter and put the matter for consideration on Friday.

Petitioner-candidates, led by senior advocate Salman Khurshid and Harvinder Chaudhary, sought the quashing of the CLAT 2018 examination besides a re-test alleging that several inconsistencies had cropped up during the test held on May 13 for admission to undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in premier National Law Universities.