GLC Mumbai Excluded from First Round of Maharashtra Law Admissions
Government Law College (GLC) in Mumbai and dozens of other institutions affiliated with the University of Mumbai have been excluded from the first round of Maharashtra’s law Centralised Admission Process (CAP), leaving nearly half of the state's law seats unavailable to applicants.
According to sources, GLC was left out of the initial admission round after failing to pay its mandatory fees to the Bar Council of India (BCI), a prerequisite for approval. Although the college has since cleared the payment and is expected to join the process in the second round upon receiving approval, top-ranked aspirants are currently unable to select the state's oldest law college as their first preference.
Under current CAP rules, candidates allotted their first-preference college must compulsorily accept the seat or face automatic exclusion from the entire admission cycle. Because GLC was missing from the first round, high-scoring applicants forced to rank alternative institutions at the top of their list risk losing the chance to compete for GLC should it become available in subsequent rounds.
Data available with the Directorate of Higher Education (DHE) as of August 5 revealed that only 102 colleges offering the three-year LLB programme, totaling 10,105 seats, and 66 colleges offering the five-year integrated LLB course, with 5,955 seats, were cleared for round one. These cleared seats serve a pool of nearly 54,000 applicants for the three-year course and 20,000 applicants for the five-year programme.
In addition to BCI approval delays, the University of Mumbai flagged several affiliated institutions for failing to meet mandatory staffing requirements, such as appointing qualified principals and maintaining adequate full-time faculty. These deficiencies must be rectified before the affected colleges can participate in admissions.
Some relief may follow an upcoming court hearing, which a law college principal indicated could lead to additional institutions being added to the process. To address student concerns, the CET Cell requested state government approval to allow candidates to revise and refill their option forms before the second and third rounds of admissions as more colleges obtain the necessary approvals.
Commenting on social media, lawyer Megha Yadav criticized the situation, calling it a systemic compliance failure that regulators and colleges allowed to build up for years, leaving candidates facing uncertainty over seats, schedules, and institute credibility.
