Hyderabad: There is a need for effective measures to put an end to discrimination in educational institutions, and authorities should show empathy towards the affected students, Chief Justice of India Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud said on Saturday.
Delivering the silver jubilee lecture at the 19th annual convocation of NALSAR University, Hyderabad, CJI Chandrachud expressed concern over the growing incidents of deaths by suicide of students from marginalised communities.
Referring to the recent incident of the death of a Dalit student by suicide at Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, the CJI said such incidents due to caste discrimination had become common these days.
“But I have also been wondering where our institutions are going wrong, that the students are forced to give up their precious lives, in these instances,” he said. “The issue is directly linked to lack of empathy in educational institutions,” he added.
The first step to solve the issue was to recognise the problem, the CJI said, adding that “nurturing empathy could end the culture of exclusion”.
While appreciating the role of national law universities (NLUs) in providing quality legal education, the CJI said the experiment with the NLUs was to create accessible institutions focused on quality legal education, not elite institutions.
The NLUs continue to remain inaccessible to wide sections of society and there had been concerns about their entrance examination patterns, which act as an access barrier for students not well acquainted with English, he added.
Highlighting that the idea behind creating the NLUs was not to leave behind the traditional law universities or central universities, he said a majority of judges on the bench, including the Supreme Court, were a product of traditional law universities.
“The NLUs should be leaders in legal education, which should help other law colleges’ grow academically. The NLUs should not work in isolation,” he said.
Telangana high court chief justice and Ujjal Bhuyan, chancellor of NALSAR, presided over the convocation, while state law minister A Indrakaran Reddy was the guest of honour.
Supreme Court justice PS Narasimha and V Ramasubramanian and former top court justices S S M Quadri and PV Reddi also attended the convocation. Srikrishna Deva Rao, vice-chancellor of NALSAR University of Law, delivered the welcome address.
In all, 58 gold medals were presented to meritorious students. A total of 258 students were conferred degrees.
