The Bar Council of India (BCI) has postponed the announcement of the results for the 13th All India Bar Exam (AIBE), held on 23 December 2018, for the third time, pushing candidates’ wait for the grading of OMR-answer sheets to three months.

According to a notification on its website, results now definitely won’t be out until the end of March (optimistically):

With reference to letter Dated: 11th March,2019 Ref no BCI:73/2019(AIBE), received from Bar Coucnil of India ; it is being notified that the result for AIBE 13 will be declared tentatively by the end of March 2019 ( after the approval from the General Council )

The results for AIBE 13 were originally to be announced in the middle of February, but a first notification on the AIBE website of 20 February 2019 had pushed the date to 25 February “latest by 5.00PM”.

That fairly definitive-sounding deadline passed but was marked with another extension a day later, on 26 February, to the “1st week of March”.

That too didn’t happen, and today’s notification has pushed it further still.

Not the first time

The BCI and AIBE have had a long and awful track-record of not sticking to self-imposed deadlines

There were some positive signs with AIBE 13 that the BCI would finally keep to its schedule of holding the exam, which is compulsory for law graduates, twice per year.

In December of last year, the BCI also made nine previous AIBE papers available for download, finally, in its first effort at transparency surrounding the exam in nearly forever.

However, this latest delay is another chapter in the long-running AIBE saga that suggests the BCI and its controversially appointed private contractor ITES Horizon Pvt Ltd don’t really know what they’re doing.

Before hoping that the AIBE will raise standards in the profession, the BCI would do well to raise its own.