Degrees on protest, justice on hold: The silent crisis of overnight approved law colleges

“The high-class racket that masquerades as legal education continues to enrol students, only to hand them degrees of illusory worth,” wrote Fred Rodell, the fiercest critic of legal academia.

In the shadow of the recent Shri Ramswaroop Memorial University (SRMU), Barabanki episode, where recognition appeared overnight after years of regulatory slumber and nights of the student unrest, Rodell’s words acquire an almost prophetic worth.

On September 1, students of SRMU poured out on the streets, demanding answers to a question that had stalked their classrooms for three years: where was the Bar Council of India (BCI) recognition for their law courses? By the next day, the protests had aggravated, with reports of students being expelled, roughed up and detained. Many left in a state of despair over the validity of their degrees.

The fallout was immediate. Within hours of reports of a lathicharge on students, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath suspended the Circle Officer and ordered a dual inquiry - one into police excesses and another into the University’s law degrees themselves.

Then, on September 3, in a twist almost too dramatic for coincidence, the unseen suddenly became visible: a late-night letter from the BCI granting provisional approval and retroactively regularising admissions for the past two years.

But this notification did not emerge in an academic vacuum. It came after weeks of uncertainty, mobilisations on campus and students practically begging for their future to be acknowledged. They were forced into the role of petitioners and protestors before they could even become law students in the truest sense. Instead of learning jurisprudence in classrooms, they were arguing their existence on campus lawns and streets. If this is not an indictment of our legal education system, what is?

August 18, 2025: The matter surfaces; students raise concerns about missing BCI approval.

September 1: Tensions peak; protests intensify, students allegedly roughed up. Students in mass step in.

September 2: Matter aggravates even further, lathicharge on protestors.

Evening of September 2: Within hours of lathicharge, CM suspends CO and orders probe.

Evening of September 3: Suddenly, the BCI issues a letter granting provisional approval and “regularising” admissions for the past two years; made public immediately by SRMU in a jiffy.

Night of September 3: State government registers FIR against SRMU.

The text of the BCI letter is revealing. It grants one-year approval (2025–26), covers retrospective admissions (2023–24, 2024–25), but places conditions: submission of a compliance affidavit, notarised with photographs, within six months. The legal jargon is airtight, but the timing is anything but innocent.

If recognition was indeed due, why did it take three years and a student agitation to issue it? If recognition was not due, why the sudden urgency once protests gained traction? These are not technicalities; they are questions of credibility, transparency and accountability.

To lay out the rules already in place, Section 7(1)(h) of the Advocates Act, 1961 expressly mandates the BCI to “recognize universities whose degree in law shall be a qualification for enrolment as an advocate”. Rule 3 of the BCI’s Rules of Legal Education, 2008 reinforces this by stipulating that only graduates from BCI-approved institutions, notified annually on its website, can be enrolled.

Parallelly, Section 22 of the UGC Act, 1956 restricts the right to confer valid degrees to recognised universities, making it unlawful to advertise or grant qualifications without statutory approval. Taken together, these provisions make recognition not a procedural formality but a statutory precondition.

Furthermore, the Supreme Court has consistently underlined this position. In BCI v. Bonnie Foi Law College (2012), it affirmed the BCI's authority to prescribe pre-enrolment standards including the requirement that law degrees must come from colleges recognised by the BCI. The Court in Committee of Management Anuragi Devi Degree College v. State of UP (2016) further condemned admissions without prior approval as disastrous.

To make things even worse for the university, the Supreme Court very categorically noted in Arulmigu Kalasalingam College of Education v Appeal Committee (2023) that if any degree is granted by a college that had admitted students during the period when the college suffered from withdrawal of recognition or affiliation, then such a degree or certificate cannot be treated as a valid qualification for the purpose of employment. Resultantly, the Court even slapped ₹5 lakh costs on the college.

These pronouncements, read with the statutory framework, leave no doubt that operating a law programme without BCI recognition is a direct violation of central law and binding precedent, rendering the degrees conferred legally infirm.

Strikingly, the University’s own digital materials falsely assured students of regulatory compliance. On its website, SRMU listed “BCI Approval” under its “Approvals & Associations” section with a linked PDF, and the Institute of Legal Studies page asserted it was “approved by the Bar Council of India.”

Such representations, when made without actual recognition, constitute a serious misrepresentation and a fraud on the public. Yet, despite these judicial admonitions, the cycle repeats itself: universities and law colleges run unapproved courses, students suffer, protests erupt, approvals surface.

The law curriculum prescribes Contracts before Drafting, Jurisprudence before Litigation. But SRMU students, and many like them across India, are forced into a reversed pedagogy. Their first real assignment is not an internship brief, but drafting demands, complaints and sometimes even writ petitions. They don’t moot hypothetical problems; they argue their very existence as law students.

What greater paradox than students of law being compelled to litigate the legality of their own course? They become petitioners before the High Court even before being enrolled as advocates. The road, instead of leading them to internships or court practice, leads them to street protests where their slogans are their first lessons in advocacy. This is not legal education, it is legal survival.

The larger implications of such ad hoc recognition are deeply troubling. For students, the absence of timely BCI approval is not a mere administrative glitch, it is the theft of years of life, money, and dreams, especially when recognition affects eligibility to enrol as advocates. According to recent data, India is home to over 1,700 law colleges recognized by the BCI as of 2024, with estimates ranging up to 2,000 operational law institutions producing nearly 80,000–90,000 graduates each year.

Despite that when recognition arrives only after student protests or court interventions, it renders legal mandates into mere ceremonial gestures. This reactionary pattern erodes trust in the regulator. The BCI, constitutionally charged with maintaining educational standards, risks looking more like a reluctant negotiator than a proactive watchdog.

It is not as though the BCI has been inactive in recent years. On the contrary, it has exercised robust control over practising advocates. From the Certificate of Practice rules to stringent eligibility norms and continuing threats of suspension for default, the BCI’s danda has often fallen swiftly and harshly upon lawyers already in the profession. The urgency in the All India Bar Examination (AIBE) can also be witnessed when the format, eligibility and timelines are tweaked with remarkable speed, but how would a student even reach the stage of writing AIBE?

When it comes to the road to becoming a lawyer in the first place, the Council’s zeal seems to evaporate. The path for students, the future of the profession, is riddled with speed breakers so bumpy that many crash before they even reach the starting line. This duality is hard to miss. For practicing lawyers, the BCI’s hand is heavy and immediate. For students, BCI’s hand is either invisible or appears only under the shadow of protests.

What message does this send? That the gatekeepers are more concerned with controlling the profession than ensuring that only those from valid, approved institutions ever reach its gates in the first place. The SRMU episode has laid bare this contradiction. If the BCI can swiftly suspend advocates for procedural defaults, why can’t it act with equal urgency to prevent universities from running unapproved courses and jeopardising careers?

Let us not be naïve. The overnight approval on September 3 did not happen in an apolitical vacuum. A major private university facing mounting student unrest is a reputational crisis. Add student wings mobilising, media spotlight, administrative embarrassment and the Chief Minister’s swift action, and what was pending for years becomes urgent overnight.

But what about lesser-known institutions without such visibility? Their students remain invisible casualties, with no protests to amplify their voices and no urgent notifications to rescue their careers.

The SRMU predicament is more than a local scandal, it is a mirror held up to the cracks in India’s legal education framework. When recognition appears only after street protests and police action, it signals a system reactive rather than regulatory, leaving students to gamble their futures on uncertainty. The irony is stark: punishment has been stricter than the rules themselves, with SRMU quick to impose late fees even as it faltered on securing mandatory approvals.

The statutes are clear, the precedents are unambiguous and the stakes are national: the credibility of the Bar itself. Unless accountability is enforced and recognition made transparent, India risks producing not a generation of confident lawyers, but one perpetually questioning whether their degrees carry the weight of law.

Agatha Shukla and Siddharth Shankar Dubey are lawyers practising in Lucknow.