When Karthika Annamalai was in Class VI, a visit by a lawyer to her school, run by a non-profit, made a deep impression. “He described a case where a landlord cut off the thumb of one of his workers as punishment. I thought, that could have been my mother,” says Annamalai, whose mother, then just widowed, was working in a granite quarry near the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu border and had to bring up four children on an income of Rs 100-150 a day.The 11-year-old figured that if she became a lawyer, she might be in a position to help vulnerable people like her mother. Nearly a decade on, her mother continues to work in the quarry, earning Rs 5,000-7,000 a month but now they both know that it will not be for long.For, Annamalai, currently a fourth-year student at the prestigious National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), Kolkata , has accepted an offer from law firm AZB & Partners at a salary of over Rs 80,000. While her story is a heart-warming testimony to the transformative power of education , it is also not as simple as that of an underprivileged girl working hard till she achieved her dream.There are multiple obstacles in the way of that dream, ranging from the average fees of Rs 2 lakh a year at national law universities, to the Rs 30,000 that law school entrance coaching institutes charge, to the emphasis on fluency in English and the social capital that is often needed to get an internship.A 2013-14 survey of national law universities revealed that over 70% of students were from homes where both parents spoke fluent English while a minuscule 1% had attended schools in the vernacular medium. Over half the students belonged to families that enjoyed an average annual income of Rs 10 lakh and more. Annamalai herself says that though she got a good education, thanks to her school, and could have cracked the entrance exam, neither she nor her alma mater would have been able to afford the fees of a law school.Lawyer Shamnad Basheer was struck by the lack of diversity this resulted in, when he returned to India to teach at NUJS in 2008, after six years abroad. During a class on intellectual property rights, the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) alumnus mentioned plant varieties and asked the 40-50 students how many of them had been in an agricultural field.“Not a single hand went up! Agriculture is the backbone of this country but I didn’t have a single person in that class familiar with what India is all about,” recalls Basheer. With the help of a couple of students, he conducted a survey of incoming students and found that of the 100-odd students, only one had come from a school in a rural area, and only one had been taught in the vernacular language.Everyone else, he realised, was educated in English-medium schools, were urban-bred and had high income levels. While one could argue that such discrepancies need not be confined to law schools, Basheer, who currently teaches at NLSIU, felt this was a particularly bad portent for the legal profession. “We teach equality and social justice but in our own backyards, we had a serious exclusionary problem.”While there is reservation for students from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in national law universities, Basheer realised there were children outside these communities who were still underprivileged, such as people from the Northeast or Kashmir or from religious minorities, whose representation in law schools seemed to be minuscule.Even those students who availed of reservation seemed to be from the “creamy layer” of their communities, as he discovered first-hand when he asked students from Sikkim to accompany him for a field visit. “We were planning to travel by train but I was informed that the two students from Sikkim, who came through the reservation, would be joining us by flight!”Merely having reservation, he saw, would not help because without proactive programmes, law schools would continue to attract a majority of students from privileged backgrounds. With the aim of addressing this disparity, Basheer set up Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access to Legal Education IDIA ) in 2010 to help students from financially weak families secure admission to the country’s top national law universities and fund their legal education. Annamalai was one of the first successful candidates.Of the 200 students it has trained over the past five years, 54 have got admission to the national law universities and another 16 into traditional law colleges, who would be supported with additional training. When the Common Law Admission Test ( CLAT ) results were announced earlier this month, another 13 had made it to the national law universities.With a network of 500 volunteers in 18 cities and towns, mainly law school students, IDIA spreads awareness about law as a career option, helps train students from underprivileged backgrounds for law school entrance examinations, funds successful law school candidates and helps them throughout the time they are in law school, whether it is adjusting to the new environment or for internships.The first was important because volunteers found that law was never considered as a career option by many parents in rural areas. “People in rural areas have no clue that law is one of the most lucrative professions today or that lawyering can also mean board room lawyering, international lawyering, policy work or legal journalism. If their children are semi-bright, they want them to do medicine or engineering,” says Basheer. The main criterion for an IDIA scholarship is family income, after which priority is given to girl students and to differently abled candidates.Out of 50-60 students selected for training every year through a basic test, around 15 would be from schools for the underprivileged run by NGOs, where the quality of education would be high, 10-20 from rural schools and the rest from city schools that are either vernacular-medium or government schools. This year’s success stories include Aritra Mondal , who has got admission into Gujarat National Law University When Mondal lost his father, a businessman who was the sole breadwinner in the family, his education was also in danger of ending. “We had absolutely no income and I started doing some part-time jobs . I was also not in the frame of mind to give exams,” says Mondal. Through a neighbour, he got in touch with IDIA, which helped him prepare for CLAT, paid for his coaching and will now be funding his legal education.“They really helped me out. I wouldn’t have been able to do much without them,” says Mondal. Comparisons with the legendary Super 30 in Bihar which trains 30 bright but poor students every year for the Indian Institutes of Technology come to mind but Annamalai says IDIA is not just about coaching for the entrance exam or the scholarship, though these are important.“Thanks to their network, I’ve got opportunities even the rich kids in my college do not have access to. They also made sure my social life on campus is balanced, and that I don’t face any discrimination on campus,” she says. In her first year in college hostel, in a dorm full of girls from wealthy families, she was once accused of stealing a couple of apples that another dorm-mate had bought.“But the IDIA volunteers spoke to her and sorted things out,” she says.More than caste, discrimination on campus tends to be based on the ability to speak English well. “They keep that as an indicator of the social structure a student is from,” she says. Thangminal Haokip, an IDIA scholarship recipient now in his third year at NLSIU in Bengaluru , agrees that it is tough to fit in initially. The son of daily wage agricultural cultivators in Manipur earning Rs 5,000 a month, Haokip says there is usually not much help for those who come from NGOrun or rural schools, who don’t speak English well.Ranbir Singh, vice-chancellor of National Law University, Delhi , does not agree entirely that law schools are the sole purview of the privileged. “From the students who come to join us, I hardly see children of bureaucrats, lawyers or judges. They are mostly from middle-class families,” says Singh. But as Basheer mentions, Singh too found that students coming in through the SC/ST quota tend to be from wealthy backgrounds.“And I don’t know how this can be rectified.” What he does admit is that law universities in general need to do much more to improve the diversity of its student population. “For instance, there are law schools that accept students through the NRI category, which is nothing but the ability to pay. Others have state domicile reservation, which could also be done away with,” he says.Both NLU and NLSIU in Bengaluru give a full fee waiver to IDIA scholars while students at other law universities are financed by donors, mainly other lawyers, such as Zia Mody, and corporate law firms like Khaitan & Co. Basheer says that volunteers have also begun reaching out to other underprivileged communities, such as children of sex workers in Mumbai . The aim, he says, is to create community leaders who would both bridge the inclusivity gap and create lawyers from within those marginalised communities who could speak for them. “But when people ask me about the long-term goal of IDIA, I say I’d be happiest if it became redundant because the ecosystem is so good that there’s no need for a third-party player like us to level the playing field,” he adds.