ALLIES IN A CRISIS

Around 175 students from law schools across the country joined Parichay, a platform set up by five NLUs to assist Assam lawyers representing those left out of the NRC.

- Atul Krishna

As a student of the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research, or NALSAR, in Hyderabad, Oorvi Mehta, 22, did get “pushed into” doing a few “corporate internships”, but she always knew she wanted to work on human rights. And in August, 2019, a massive human rights crisis seemed imminent. On August 31, the final list on the National Register of Citizens, or NRC, was released in Assam. Missing from it: over 19 lakh people who could not prove to the satisfaction of the state that they had been in India before 1971.

As panic spread, three assistant professors in three law schools founded Parichay, a platform to place law students as interns with lawyers in Assam who are representing those left out of the NRC. Mohsin Alam Bhat, who teaches at Jindal Global Law School, discussed the possibility of getting the National Law Universities (NLUs) involved with Anoop Surendranath from NLU Delhi. They were joined by Darshana Mitra from the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (WBNUJS), Kolkata.

“They [the NLUs] thought that it would be a good learning platform for the students and also that they would be able to contribute to legal representation,” said Bhat. Finally, five NLUs joined in and in early October, Parichay was launched. Now it is mostly student-led.

Mehta promptly signed up. Tamalika Bera, in her final year at WBNUJS, did too. Arunima Nair, a third-year student of Jindal Global Law School, was an early entrant and is now one of Parichay’s 13 core volunteers.

Question of identity