Mumbai University moots law correspondence courses

The increasing demand for Mumbai University’s three and five year law courses has prompted the varsity to moot a plan for correspondence courses which it will present to the Bar Council for approval.

Despite the Bar Council refusing to offer courses through correspondence, university officials said their proposal was not meant for students who wanted to pursue a career in law and the judiciary rather for those who wanted career growth in fields other than the judiciary.

Speaking about the proposal, Dr Ashok Yende, Professor and Head of the Department of Law, Mumbai University, said that in the past couple of years, there had been an unprecedented demand for admission to three and five year LLB and BLS courses offered by the university. However, due to a recent government order stalling starting of new colleges or granting of permission for additional divisions, a number of student applications had to be turned away and could not secure admission to these courses.

“The university has been inundated with requests for offering the course through correspondence but as the Bar Council has refused to allow it, we have had to turn away students. However, as many of these students want to pursue the course to improve their scope in non-judicial professions, we will be proposing a separate degree programme for such students to the Bar Council when we meet them soon,” said Dr Yende.

He added that the university would put forward the proposal to the Bar Council in a meeting on August 21 with the vice-chancellor Dr Sanjay Deshmukh and members of the department of law.

“We realise that students are looking towards the university to resolve the problem and hence, are exploring all options to overcome the issue of shortage of seats in the law stream,” said Dr Yende.

Source | Asian Age |20 August 2015