The court directed the state government to secure the university’s construction against obstruction by the local villagers.

Nevertheless, NUSRL vice chancellor professor AK Koul told Legally India that if the government did not make Rs 43 crores available to the college in order to start the first phase of construction, it would have to halt admissions in the coming academic session due to a lack of space.

“If the State government is interested to open up the law universities, but there is zero infrastructure, they [the students] do not have any future here. Why should a student join my university?” asked Koul.

NUSRL second and third year students Abhinav Prakash, Saurav Bhaumik, Abhishek Chaube, Ashish Abhijit, Riddhi D Souza, and Aditi Singh had intervened in the public interest litigation of the bar association of Jharkhand praying for government action against the local villagers who were obstructing the construction of NUSRL’s campus.

NUSRL was allotted 63 acres for its campus in Nagri Village by the government of Jharkhand last year, and in January the university constructed its boundary wall on the allotted land. However, in April local villagers protested against the construction and demolished the boundary wall.

The villagers asserted their claim to the disputed land on the basis that when the land was acquired from their ancestors by the government more than 50 years ago, they were not compensated in lieu of it. They argued that because the land was agricultural in nature, it was their primary source of survival.

The interveners, all members of NUSRL’s Centre for Legal Aid Programme (CLAP) researched and presented scientific data to the court suggesting that the land in question yielded agricultural produce far below the minimum recognised “per person per day requirement”. They submitted that it was impossible that the persons who were claiming total dependency on agriculture had a genuine claim.

The chief justice’s bench admitted the students’ submission and ordered: “So far as the construction is concerned that must be cleared by the State Government in the administrative side within two weeks from today so that actual construction of the building of at least National Law University may start which has to give the admission to the students in time which can be done provided that it will have its own hostel and other infrastructure.”

The court ruled that the university can resume construction from 25 September and the state government is required to secure the construction.

Koul commented: “The government had washed its hands of the dispute. That was something surprising, that the government who had given this land to us said we’re sorry we have given you this land but it is fertile land. We had spent [Rs] four crores on the construction of the boundary wall.”

Koul told Legally India that according to the present blueprint, the estimated total cost of construction would come to Rs 400 crore out of which Rs 100 crore was required immediately to begin construction of the academic block and the hostels. The university purse presently held only Rs 57 crore, which, according to Koul, was sanctioned by the state government 10 years ago.

“This university has been in limbo for the last 10 years,” he said, adding: “Everything is ready but unfortunately the government has to provide us the logistics. They are not providing the logistics rather they are inciting the villagers.

“In Jharkhand there is a lot of land mafia.”

The law school admitted its first batch of students in 2010, providing them accommodation in three different hostels since then, stated the intervention application. The hostels were all so far from the campus that buses needed to be organised.

Koul told Legally India that the students had access to only an “online library”, and there was no room for moot court and other co-curricular and extra-curricular activities at the law school at present.

One student of the university complained: “We are suffering from this problem, there is no place to put books in the library, Manupatra and Lexis Nexis are not enough to us, we are not getting very interactive over here because of a small mess. Recently we conducted a national seminar in a rented stadium in the vicinity but we have no place of our own for these activities.”

In June of last year, Legally India had reported that the NUSRL dean vowed that the 100 acre campus grounds allotted by the state government, would help NUSRL become one of the best law colleges in the country.

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