The mandatory attendance debate

Delhi HC's verdict on mandatory attendance has divided law schools - while some bat for flexibility, others defend rule to maintain discipline

- Musab Qazi & Sheena Sachdeva

The Delhi High Court (HC), in a judgment last month, held that no law student should be barred from appearing for exams due to lack of sufficient attendance. The order, which emanated from a suo moto petition launched by the Supreme Court (SC) in 2016 following the suicide of Sushant Rohilla, a law student of Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha (IP) University, New Delhi, also called upon the Bar Council of India (BCI) to review its stringent attendance norms.

The verdict has given fresh fodder to an issue causing problems at the country’s top law schools. The mandatory attendance policy has long been a bone of contention between the law faculty and college administration looking to ensure ‘discipline’ and the students seeking a more flexible approach towards learning. While the verdict has given fillip to the students’ push for doing away with the mandatory attendance, or at least relaxing it in some measures, the institutes have expressed reservations about potential reforms in attendance policy, and have asserted that the scope of HC’s judgement is limited to the institutes in Delhi.

Nevertheless, post-verdict, some of the law education institutes have announced changes in their attendance policy. The National Law University (NLU) Delhi, which is within the territorial jurisdiction of HC, stopped detaining students for want of attendance and allowed the defaulters to submit an assignment to compensate for their absence.

OP Jindal Global University (JGU) at Sonipat, Haryana, which includes Jindal Global Law School (JGLS), also did away with the mandatory attendance requirement as the precondition for taking end-semester tests for all its programmes. Symbiosis International, a deemed-to-be university in Pune, said it will accord students various remedial measures mentioned in HC after the ongoing cycle of law exams.