National Law Universities: Ambedkar's Nightmare

The National Law Universities were born from a promise when NLSIU Bangalore opened in 1987 to produce constitutional warriors and democratize legal education, but four decades later today's NLUs function primarily as a training grounds for corporate law firms where the best minds serve the top one percent while the bottom 99 percent navigate a justice system systematically starved of talent in what amounts to structural betrayal by design.

Rich, Elite, and Exclusive

The myth of NLU meritocracy collapses when examining economics. The typical (median) Indian household survives on approximately ₹2 lakh per year, while premium CLAT coaching costs ₹1 to 4 lakh for one to two years, meaning a middle-class family must spend nearly two years of total income to compete for entry. The CLAT has spawned a multi-crore niche industry that mimics the worst excesses of the ₹65,000 crore coaching sector that systematically excludes rural students lacking English medium schooling, SC/ST/OBC students from non-affluent backgrounds, and anyone from smaller cities without elite coaching access. While the coaching barrier creates a creamy layer within the creamy layer where reserved seats are captured by economically privileged families, as Dalit Bahujan students from landless backgrounds remain structurally excluded. IDIA surveys demonstrate that over 80 percent of students in top NLUs accessed expensive coaching, more than 80 percent come from English medium schools despite India being 85 percent non-English primary education, between 60 to 70 percent hail from just 8 to 10 metro cities, rural students constitute a negligible 1 to 3 percent, and Muslim representation stands at approximately 3.4 percent against a population share of 14 percent.

Once students breach entry barriers, they face a sustenance trap. Unlike traditional universities, which remain heavily subsidised, NLUs have been forced into a 'self-financing' death spiral by State Governments that have slashed block grants to less than 15 percent of operational costs. The State effectively authorized the privatization of public education, compelling Vice-Chancellors to extract revenue from students like corporate CEOs extracting value for shareholders, with NLSIU Bangalore charging ₹2 lakh for five years in 2015 but inflating to ₹12 to 15 lakhs by 2026, a staggering 600 to 650 percent increase during a period when CPI inflation grew merely 60 percent, while an MBBS at AIIMS costs ₹5,000 to 7,000 total. Tuition represents merely baseline costs as moot, and other competitions cost ₹8,000 to 20,000, internships require self-funded housing for unpaid positions running ₹25,000 to 1 lakh, and living expenses add ₹50,000 to 1.2 lakh annually, such that total five-year costs reach ₹18 to 24 lakhs minimum.

The Only Choice

These astronomical costs mean graduates exit with debt frequently exceeding ₹25 lakh, with typical EMI for ₹12 lakh loans running ₹15,000 to 18,000 monthly over ten years. Corporate law positions at Tier 1 firms pay ₹12 to 18 lakhs annually with monthly take home reaching ₹70,000 to 1 lakh allowing loan servicing, while litigation offers entirely different economics where years one to two pay ₹0 to 10,000 monthly in effectively unpaid labour, and years three to five might bring ₹15,000 to 40,000 if fortunate, meaning graduates simply cannot service loan EMIs for three to five years minimum if choosing litigation. The rational choice thus becomes the only choice, as students carrying ₹15 lakh debt cannot choose litigation without independent family wealth to subsidise survival, revealing that career choice is economic coercion operating through structured financial constraint. This debt burden does not merely redirect career choices; it manufactures a particular kind of professional. A graduate servicing EMIs of ₹15,000 to 18,000 per month cannot afford to have an inconvenient opinion or challenge the establishment that employs them. They are compelled to remain in good standing before the court and in the good books of corporate clients not by ideological preference, but by financial necessity. Litigation, paying nothing for the first two years and rarely enough to service a loan in years three to five simply cannot support this obligation. The result is the systematic economic creation of the careerist: a technically proficient lawyer whose debt obligations enforce a structural silence on matters of public interest, producing precisely the risk-averse professional, fearing to express opinion, that undermines the constitutional purpose NLUs were built to serve. Unfortunately, the judiciary largely favours safe, apolitical, and non-controversial advocates for elevation to the bench or committee roles, often sidelining those with genuine social commitment.

The Bar Council of India's systematic inaction worsens this coercion. The exploitation of junior advocates through unpaid or near-unpaid work is not primarily a product of individual senior greed; it is a predictable consequence of a saturated legal market where far more lawyers enter practice than there are paying briefs to support them. Seniors who do not pay juniors adequately are themselves navigating a profession whose economics have been left unregulated at the bottom. The institutional failure lies squarely with the BCI, which has the power to mandate minimum stipends but has chosen to merely nudge. In October 2024, the BCI recommended ₹20,000 monthly minimum for junior advocates but explicitly termed the circular directory and flexible rather than mandatory, creating no legal obligation and rendering it effectively toothless. The distinction matters: voluntary guidance leaves juniors at the mercy of market conditions and individual senior discretion, while a mandatory minimum would structurally alter the calculus. BCI Chairperson Manan Kumar Mishra has publicly lamented that less than 20 percent of NLU students choose litigation, yet the BCI which has the regulatory authority to make litigation economically viable through enforceable stipend mandates continues to issue recommendations rather than rules.

But the loss of public voice does not begin when graduates enter the job market; it begins in the classroom. The corporatisation runs far deeper than economics into epistemology, as the knowledge produced within NLU walls has been thoroughly shaped by market logic, with curricular analysis revealing that 60 to 70 percent of advanced electives cater specifically to corporate practice, while social justice options number just 5 to 8 courses, often undersubscribed and threatened with cancellation. This structural bias in curriculum design is not incidental; it produces exactly the kind of lawyer that emerges from NLUs at scale: technically skilled but socially disconnected, trained in the architecture of corporate transactions while remaining largely unequipped for constitutional litigation or public law practice. Faculty recruitment reinforces this pattern, with NLUs hiring corporate lawyers as adjunct faculty at ₹50,000 to 1 lakh per course while struggling to find agrarian law specialists. The internship structure creates a further corporate funnel where top slots go to top firms while public interest organisations offer unpaid positions, and district courts are treated as last resort options rather than formative professional experiences.

A Mental Crisis

The psychological toll manifests devastatingly. A 2023 NLSIU survey found 68 percent of students reported anxiety disorders and 34 percent depression symptoms, while counselling provides merely one counsellor per 800 to 1,000 students against WHO recommendations of one per 500, and whisper networks confirm multiple suicides at premier NLUs between 2018 and 2024. Day Zero placements create intense psychological stratification while normalising 16-hour workdays as rigour rather than exploitation, such that students internalise they are worth nothing more than their placement package and class rank.

The ultimate victim is India's justice delivery system, as public prosecutor posts paying ₹40,000 to 80,000 monthly cannot attract top NLU talent drowning in debt (not to mention the political connection you need to be a govt counsel in many states and the slow appointment system), vacancies run at 40 percent across states reaching 55 percent in Uttar Pradesh, and conviction rates stagnate at 45 to 48 percent overall with rape cases seeing merely 27 percent and POCSO cases managing just 32 percent. Fewer than 30 of 10,000 NLU graduates over the last decade joined public prosecution representing 0.3 percent, and legal aid presents catastrophic failure with NALSA allocating merely ₹100 to 150 crores nationally or ₹0.70 per citizen yearly, paying lawyers ₹5,000 to 10,000 per case with six-to-twelve-month delays, while NLU graduates doing legal aid full time represent less than 0.5 percent of total graduates.

Law: The Rich Man's Penny

The disparities become starker examining specific cases, as more than 250 UAPA cases were pending in 2024 with accused being largely Adivasis, Muslims, and students relying on overworked legal aid while fewer than 10 top NLU graduates defended these cases nationally but over 500 worked for Adani, Ambani, and Tata legal teams, meaning India's richest 100 corporations employ over 5,000 lawyers from top schools while India's poorest 100 million citizens receive representation from fewer than 500.

The state created NLUs then systematically defunded them by reducing contributions to less than 10 to 20 percent of operational budgets thereby forcing revenue extraction from students, the judiciary refuses to mandate junior advocate stipends and ignores legal aid collapse, NLUs have embraced corporate partnerships over public missions allowing complete curriculum capture, the Bar Council has abdicated regulatory duty protecting exploitative systems, and the corporate legal industry extracts talent through debt coercion while shaping curriculum through sponsorships normalizing 80 hour weeks making litigation economically unviable.

The Warning Came True

On 26 January 1950 Dr. Ambedkar warned that we are entering a life of contradictions where in politics we will have equality, but in social and economic life we will have inequality, and that we must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy itself. The NLU system cements precisely this inequality. The British created English educated Indian elites to administer Empire and Independent India has created NLU educated legal elites to administer neoliberal capitalism with both systems betraying the masses they ostensibly claimed to serve, and when the Constitution becomes a dead letter for 80 percent of citizens while being enforced vigorously only when corporate interests align, communities inevitably revert to caste panchayats, mob lynchings, and honour killings as the formal legal system becomes increasingly irrelevant for ordinary Indians while a legal profession captured by capital proves structurally incapable of checking executive overreach.

The National Law University project has comprehensively failed its constitutional mandate, as what was conceived as a democratizing force has devolved into a stratification engine producing lawyers who simultaneously cannot afford to serve the poor due to structural financial constraint, do not understand the poor due to class and caste segregation from childhood, and are institutionally trained through curriculum and culture not to serve the poor but rather to serve capital accumulation. The contradictions deepen with each passing year, the constitutional republic is diminished one corporate placement at a time, the Temple of Justice has been re-oriented into a marketplace where students are evaluated primarily by placement package and class rank, and the system is now in urgent need not of marginal adjustment but of fundamental reform and reconstruction from first principles. Those with power to enact such reform are, too often, the system's primary beneficiaries—and so the NLU continues its drift away from its founding mandate, leaving the Constitution's promise of equal justice as an aspiration increasingly distant from lived reality. The contradictions Ambedkar warned of grow harder to ignore with each passing year.

References:

1.https://www.idialaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/IDIA-AR-2024.pdf

2.https://www.barcouncilofindia.org/info/bcid-5383--bz6uy6

3.https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2187718®=3&lang=2

4.https://doj.gov.in/vacancy-position/

5.https://www.nls.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/NLS-FINAL-ANNUAL-REPORT-AY-2023-24.pdf

6.https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2088390®=3&lang=2#:~:text=Press Release:Press Information Bureau,4:00PM by PIB Delhi

Author is a Law student at Aligarh Muslim University Centre in Malappuram. Views are personal