The Karnataka government has made a pledge with assembly elections impending, to move NLSIU Bangalore to rural Karnataka’s Gangavati town, in a bid to boost students taking up social lawyering and agriculture-related laws, according to local paper Kannada Praba (a big hat-tip to the anonymous reader who spotted this one).

According to a working Google translation, Praba reported:

Bangalore NLS will go to Gangavati city

According to the Karnataka Election Program, the Government of Karnataka has set up the National Law School of India University Bangalore University in the Gangavati Rural town of 100 acres campus in Rice Bowl.

By 2022 the government promised to fulfill this order, promoting social law instead of corporate law and promoting agriculture instead of concentrating on corporate law.

(Please do leave a comment with a better translation of the article if you are a Kannada speaker).

We have reached out to vice chancellor Venkata Rao for comment.

The campus would be more than four times the size of NLSIU’s current 23 acres, and would be nearly twice as large as most other national law school campuses.

The largest campus size currently tops out at 65 acres in the case of HNLU Raipur, with MNLU Nagpur being set to get a 60 acre campus, we had reported in February).

Gangavati is also known as the rice bowl city of Karnataka due to its many rice mills and rice exporters, and also hosts Asia’s first Rice Technology Park, according to a 2016 report in The Hindu.

According to Google’s translate version of the Praba report, Yangamma Hoolima Lingappa, a member of the Gangavati Urban Municipal Council said: “Many students are focusing on the wrong things and not giving back to the Kannadiga people. Gangavati gives food to the people and gives food to people’s brain.”

The move would be a big boost for NLSIU’s ageing infrastructure, being currently based in Bangalore’s outskirts in the infamously snake-riddled Nagarbhavi district.