When Professor Shammad Basheer returned from a stint abroad to teach at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (WB NUJS), he was struck by the homogeneous profile of his students: public school educated, well-heeled, and English-speaking; in sharp contrast, around only 1% of his students had been educated in a vernacular medium.
Keen to correct this imbalance in representation, Basheer established Increasing Diversity By Increasing Access to Legal Education (IDIA) in 2010, with a view to help aspiring, underprivileged students with tutorial and financial assistance to pursue law.
IDIA has a core of 500 volunteers working across 18 locations in India. They counsel students about the perks of the legal profession, prepare them for the Common Law Admission Test and help in funding college fees. They also provide support to youngsters acclimatizing to their new social environment, which given the rigid rural-urban divide can be challenging, by helping them to overcome language and socio-economic barriers.
Premier institutes such as the NLU and NLSIU at Bengaluru chip in by fully exempting the fees of meritorious IDIA students, while large corporate law firms too have contributed by setting up a scholarship corpus.
Since its inception, IDIA has so far trained 200 candidates, focusing their effort on aiding those within marginalized communities, including individuals with special needs, children of sex workers and young girls.
The proof as they say ( in legalese or otherwise ) is in the pudding: Karthika Annamalai, the daughter of a daily wage worker and now a fourth year scholar at NUJS Kolkata, recently bagged an offer with a starting salary of Rs.80,000 from law firm AZB & Partners!
Find out more about IDIA on their site.
Featured image source: The Hindu
Words by Pavi Sagar
