MNLU Nagpur will shift from its 45 acre temporary campus to a Rs 789 crore permanent 60 acre campus by 2021, predicted its registrar NM Sakarkar having already been sanctioned Rs 200 crore from Maharashtra for the first phase of construction.

Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis had told the media last week that the state government had envisaged a Rs 750 crore project to create the “most beautiful campus in the country” for the Nagpur NLU, as first reported by the Times of India.

Sakarkar today told us that the law school would have access to Rs 75 crore before 31 March 2018 and that the public works department (PWD) had already approved the architectural plan for the new campus, which was the winning submission selected from entries in an architectural design competition conducted by the NLU.

He said that the NLU currently admitted 120 students annually in three streams of the LLB degree - the BALLB, BSC LLB and the BCom LLB.

With the Rs 200 crore sanctioned by the government for the first phase of construction, the law school would begin construction of the building for the BALLB department to accommodate the 60 students in that stream.

He said that the construction was likely to begin by August 2018, after obtaining various approvals to commence construction which are currently in process, and after the PWD publishes a tender to select the contractors.

Sakarkar said that the additional money from the government was entirely earmarked towards construction, and that the college had no requirement for hiring additional teachers for its two batches at the moment.

NLU Nagpur currently has two years of 120 LLB students and 15 permanent faculty members including one professor, four associate professors and 10 assistant professors in addition to the vice-chancellor, registrar and other non-teaching staff.

It has admitted both the batches of students through the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) and it is one of the three NLUs established under the Maharashtra National Law University Act 2014. NLU Mumbai and NLU Nagpur are the two NLUs which were established under this Act.

Does size matter?

One big question is how much law students care about the size of their campus (beyond a certain point and bragging rights, anyway)?

By contrast:

• HNLU Raipur has a 65 acre campus,
• NLIU Bhopal and JGLS Sonepat have campuses of around 60 acres,
• Nalsar Hyderabad and NLU Jodhpur both lay claim to 55 acres,
• GNLU Gandhinagar has a 50 acre campus, which it described as “monumental” in 2012 when it moved in and “spacious” and “sprawling” on its website.
• NLSIU has a campus of only 23 acres,
• while NUJS Kolkata makes do with a comparatively tiny 5 acres, according to its website.