The Bar Council of India (BCI) has opened up registration for the All India Bar Exam (AIBE) X with a delay of only 12 days after the start of registrations was previously scheduled for 6 January 2017, while also postponing the exam that was “tentatively” scheduled to be held on 26 February 2017 to a tentative date of 26th March.

According to a notification on the AIBE website:

The online Registration for AIBE X to be held tentatively on 26th March 2017 has been started. Kindly click here to Register Online.The helpline numbers for any query related to Registration are as follows : 011-49225022 23. Candidates can call the helpline any time between 10.00 A.M to 5.00 PM; Monday to Saturday.

The (unencrypted) AIBE registration form can be accessed here.

As we had predicted in our article of 4 January when the 26 February AIBE date had been announced, history was strong evidence that the BCI wouldn’t be able to keep to its deadline.

The BCI appears to have proven us right.

History of delays

The previous, ninth AIBE, had been delayed by nearly three months from December 2016 to March 2016 due to apparentissues with the AIBE website. And pretty much every other AIBE has faced delays.

The previous AIBE was held on 6 March 2016, with results having been delayed by five weeks until 20 May 2016.

As we reported earlier this month, it also took the BCI seven months since the last AIBE to begin issuing practising certificates for some states (but excluding Delhi, for instance), with another 3,500 practising certificates still remaining withheld for rather obscure reasons.huge question marks remain over whether the multi-crore contract to conduct the exam was awarded honestly to unqualified contractor ITES Horizon Private Limited by BCI chairman Manan Kumar Mishra.

The BCI’s lacklustre conduct of the exam had been raised in the Supreme Court in the clubbed petition challenging the legality of the AIBE.

As we have also reported last year, huge question marks remain over whether the multi-crore contract to conduct the exam was awarded honestly to unqualified contractor ITES Horizon Private Limited by BCI chairman Manan Kumar Mishra.

Thecontract with ITES Horizon had expired last year, according to an emailfrom Mishra in June 2016, in which he suggested that a new tender wouldbe held to find a new agency to conduct the exam.

And finally

Slightly less seriously and more amusingly, a search-replace or editing job gone wrong on the initially published version of the AIBE page appeared to have replaced nearly every link on the page to previous AIBEs, with text for the upcoming AIBE X, making it appear as though the 10th AIBE was taking place in March 2016, and that the registration process had already closed and so on.

The page was corrected a little while later during the day.