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.

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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.”

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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.”

What is NLSP

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.

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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.

‘It gave me a direction’

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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.

“I also struggled a lot with confidence, but it was the alumni network that helped me improve,” he says. “Being shown direction on all of this changed my outlook.”

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For some, opposition came in the form of societal norms. One of them is Vaishnavi RK from a lower-middle-class farming family in Palakkad, Kerala. Knowing there would be objections, 17-year-old Vaishnavi told them about taking the NLSP test after she had cleared it.

When she did, her family screamed, her neighbours advised against it, and even her teachers were apprehensive. “It was me against the whole village. Much of the argument eventually centred on safety,” she says. “But the programme changed their mindset too.”

Life on campus

On its 30-acre campus, life is busy and exciting. Students spend two years integrating coaching with regular schooling, mentoring and leadership workshops. For most students, coaching begins soon after school and continues until late evening. In between, students are encouraged to organise debates, mock parliaments and discussions on everything from geopolitics to gender studies.

For some students, it was an unfamiliar education. “I froze while speaking in public and had backed out of so many speeches before because I couldn’t even say two sentences,” says Vaishnavi. “Now, I can speak.”

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For 17-year-old A. Taruna, campus life couldn’t be more different — and farther — than the one back home in Ramdurga, a village in Karnataka’s Bellary district with just two buses a day. His father, a former lawyer, had given up his practice after an injury. His parents worried that five years of law study was too long when the family needed someone to earn. But Taruna had made up his mind in Class 8 and needed only a nudge in the right direction. Then came NLSP.

“The people who do understand the system usually have the advantage over those who don’t. It’s this gap that I want to fill,” he says.

But the programme was only the first step, as students like Anshita and Vedant are finding out. Now, there are other concerns — such as seeking internships and jobs. Applications go unanswered, calls are frequently ignored, and worry mounts. “I feel like I’m constantly trying to catch up,” she says.

Vedant, meanwhile, has had that chance. Last year, while interning with a law firm, he worked on a matter involving a major airline — something he considers a feather in his cap. When a response came back from a bigger firm, he says he sat looking at the letterhead for a while before he could read the rest of it. “I thought maybe I could work there someday.”