Navodaya to law college: How a programme is powering rural dreams

On the evenings when there were power cuts in Hapur’s Athsaini village in Uttar Pradesh, Anshita Rani’s father would come home to find her sitting in the dark with a book she couldn’t read, so he bought her a rechargeable lamp.

At 23 and in the final year of the five-year law course at National Law University, Jodhpur, Anshita still has that lamp. It’s old now and considerably weakened, but it still holds a special place for her. “It barely works now, but we still have it,” she says.

For Anshita, the lamp was a reminder of her journey, made possible not only by hard work but by an opportunity. She is part of a larger effort to bring students from places that rarely produce lawyers into the country’s most competitive law schools through the National Law Scholars Programme (NLSP), an initiative that identifies promising students at Navodaya schools, prepares them for CLAT and supports them through law school.

With CLAT registrations underway, students across the country are preparing for their law school entrance examinations — including those at NLSP. Started in 2019 as a collaboration between Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti and its alumnus Anoop Maurya, the NLSP is a fully funded two-year residential programme.

For students like Anshita, it presents an opportunity they never had before. Anshita’s family was poor and large — a joint family of 22 people living under one roof. Means were few, the house was always crowded, and finding a quiet corner to study was often a challenge.

Anshita had never given law serious consideration. That is, until Anoop Maurya’s NLSP visited her school and introduced the residential programme. “I had always wanted to do something where people would listen to what I had to say,” she says.

“When Anoop sir spoke about people from backgrounds like ours becoming leaders and shaping policy, it resonated with me.” In 2022, she successfully cracked CLAT and joined JLU. This phase has been challenging to adjust to — the feeling of being left behind by classmates with stronger English and wider networks is constant and worrying.

But Anshita knows these are just hiccups. “When I met people from across the country – people who are far more confident, articulate and worldly, I realised how small my world had been,” she says. “There were so many things that I had never known or heard of.” Every year, the NLSP conducts outreach sessions across the Navodaya network, reaching roughly 10,000 students, mostly from rural backgrounds.

Tests across the 600+ JNV schools comprise two written exams and an interview. While the written exams test school coursework, the interview checks students’ aptitude, potential, background and inclination. The two-year programme, too, is just as intense, accepting only 30 students each year.

Students who qualify move to their campus, currently in Hyderabad, where they study at the local JNV school by day and attend coaching classes in the evening. Of the 150 scholars selected for the programme in the last seven years, 120 completed the two-year NLSP residential programme and went to law school.

Of these, 84 are still pursuing law — 54 at NLUs, Those who secure admission to law schools continue receiving financial assistance from the programme — including tuition fees that can run into several lakh rupees a year.

For Anoop Maurya, an active member of the Bharat Navodaya Abhiyan (BNA) — the public service wing of the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya (JNV) alumni network — the programme stemmed from his own experience. Born in Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich and educated in the Navodaya system, the 31-year-old said school changed not only his circumstances but also his outlook.

Founder Anoop Maurya believes CLAT has become an “anti-poor exam”. “A candidate is expected to work through a 40-page paper in two hours, much of it built around lengthy English-language passages adapted from publications.

For many of the students NLSP takes on, that presents a challenge long before the examination hall,” Maurya says. For many students, NLSP offered not just coaching but a sense of direction. Among them is Vedant Ravindra Deshmukh.

For the 21-year-old from Maharashtra’s Wardha, law was never a viable career option: his father often liked to say: “Lawyers can't even afford soap to wash their coats.” It was quite by accident that Vedant took the NLSP entrance test.

His school teacher announced a notebook inspection, and Vedant slipped into a classroom to avoid it. That classroom was where the NLSP test was being held. He topped the exam across Navodaya schools in three states in 2023.

What followed was two years of struggle against family pressure and financial constraints that appeared to make CLAT more and more distant. Finally, he joined Rashtrasant Tukadoji Maharaj Nagpur University, formerly known as Nagpur University, also with NLSP’s help.