National Law Institute University, Bhopal

The National Law Institute University was the second national law school the country built, and on the Ministry of Education's 2025 law table it sits 27th. It runs two five-year degrees off the same CLAT list and they do not fill to the same depth: in the 2026 cycle the B.A.LL.B. (Hons.) open queue stopped at All India Rank 459 while the B.Sc. LL.B. (Hons.) in cyber security ran on to 698. Half the seats in each of its main categories are held for candidates carrying a Madhya Pradesh domicile certificate, which is how a state general rank of 759 also took a place that year. NLIU notifies its fee head by head instead of as a total, and its placement record is a roster of names and employers with no count and no salary attached to it, so both have to be read off the documents rather than lifted from a headline.

NLIU was created by the Rashtriya Vidhi Sansthan Vishwavidyalaya Adhiniyam, Act No. 41 of 1997 of the Madhya Pradesh legislature, substituted by Act No. 06 of 2018, and it is recognised by the University Grants Commission and the Bar Council of India, per the NLIU information brochure for CLAT 2027. That brochure also records the fact most often left out of listings about this campus: it was the second national law school established after NLSIU, Bangalore. Teaching began the year after the Act, with the first academic programme launched in 1998 and the five-year B.A.LL.B. (Hons.) starting on September 1 of that year, on the university's about page.

Head counts are reported in three blocks here, because the technology degrees are counted apart from the law ones. The NIRF 2025 data submission puts 794 students in the five-year block, 60 in the one-year LL.M. and 127 in the two-year Master of Cyber Law and Information Security. Of the five-year figure, the same filing marks 326 as resident in Madhya Pradesh, 373 as arriving from other states and 95 as coming from outside India. Home-state students are therefore more than a third of the undergraduate body, which is what a domicile reservation sitting inside the main category queues, rather than beside them, produces after five intakes.

Do not read that last count as international recruitment. Both five-year degrees carry a standing block of NRI and NRI-sponsored seats, and five places in each are set aside for foreign nationals who are admitted without sitting CLAT at all, on the terms in the CLAT 2027 brochure. The NRI route in particular is not a foreign-passport route: the brochure lets a candidate qualify through a sponsoring blood relation, so an NRI-sponsored student may hold an Indian passport while a relative abroad pays.

There are four taught degrees and a doctorate, and no single entrance covers them. Three of the four taught degrees are filled from CLAT; the fourth has its own paper.

The LL.M. carries three specialisations, in intellectual property and business law, in constitutional and administrative law, and in human rights and criminal law, and the brochure attaches a condition to each: a specialisation runs only if faculty are available for it and at least five students opt in. Read that before choosing NLIU for a named field. The final semester of both the LL.M. and MCLIS ends in a dissertation and an open defence viva.

There is no headline number to quote. What the university notifies for the cycle now open is a column of separate heads, and both five-year degrees carry exactly the same ones.

Hostel money is quoted separately and it is where the bill grows teeth, because the mess line alone comes to close to a third of tuition.

Three conditions sit around those tables and each one costs money if it is missed. Hostel charges are payable as listed or on actuals, whichever is higher, so the room rent and mess lines are a floor and not a cap. An escalator is built into the fee itself: Rs 5,000 goes onto tuition for Indian nationals every session and 5% onto every other component, so a final-year bill is materially heavier than a first-year one. And once deposited, fees are not refunded in any circumstance, which matters most to a candidate who accepts an allotment here while still hoping a preferred campus opens up. All three are printed in the CLAT 2027 brochure.

Candidates admitted under the NRI or NRI-sponsored category pay tuition of US$ 10,000 a year for the five-year degrees in that CLAT 2027 brochure, the only fee at this university quoted in a foreign currency. Separately, candidates from the SC, ST and OBC categories of Madhya Pradesh are eligible for reimbursement of specified fees and charges under an order of the state's Department of Tribal and Scheduled Caste Welfare, which the brochure records as a footnote rather than a headline.

One practical warning about the university's own numbers. Its fee schedule page does not carry a table at all; it links a separate document for each course, each year of study and each category, so a B.A.LL.B. first-year general candidate and a B.A.LL.B. second-year NRI candidate are reading two different files. Adding those files together is a job NLIU leaves to the applicant, which is worth remembering when a listing site presents one tidy five-year figure as though the university had issued it.

CLAT decides three of the four taught programmes and the university's own paper decides the fourth. The B.A.LL.B. (Hons.), the B.Sc. LL.B. (Hons.) in cyber security and the LL.M. are all filled from the Consortium's list, MCLIS is filled from an All India Entrance Test that NLIU sets and conducts itself, and doctoral admission follows UGC regulations, per the CLAT 2027 brochure.

The eligibility rule that reshapes an application is attached to the cyber security degree and it is easy to miss. The B.Sc. LL.B. (Hons.) asks for the 10+2 examination in the science stream or its equivalent, in that brochure. A commerce or humanities candidate cannot take that seat at any rank, however high. So the CLAT list is read twice over at Kerwa Dam Road: a science-stream candidate has both five-year degrees to aim at and can be seated by whichever closes later, while everyone else at NLIU is competing for the B.A.LL.B. (Hons.) alone.

Five seats in each five-year degree are earmarked for foreign nationals who are admitted directly without appearing in CLAT, and the same brochure sets the NRI test carefully. A candidate must either hold NRI, OCI or PIO status personally, or be sponsored by a first-degree or second-degree blood relation who does. Sponsorship by an employer, a family friend or a more distant relative is outside the rule as written.

The OBC condition is a documentary one and it is refused rather than argued at counselling. Only OBC candidates whose parental income is below the prescribed creamy-layer threshold may claim the reservation, and they have to produce a certificate from the competent authority stating that their parents do not currently fall in the creamy layer, in the brochure. A certificate issued for an earlier year is the commonest reason a claimed OBC seat converts.

A Cut-Off Rank Table is printed at the foot of every allotment list the Consortium issues for this university, one table per programme, which means the entry bar is a published figure and not an estimate. There are two of those tables for the five-year degrees, and their numbers pull apart.

Notice how little the open queue travels. Across four further rounds the general bar slipped only from 432 to 459 on a pool of 52 seats, so whatever else the 2026 season did at NLIU, the candidates who took an open seat here in round one very largely kept it. The reserved rows travel further, and the Scheduled Tribe row is where the two columns tell opposite stories: All India Rank 10,159 sounds remote until you read the cell beside it, which is category rank 86.

The Madhya Pradesh horizontals run inside those same categories rather than beside them, and they are where the four-figure and five-figure ranks on this campus actually come from.

On that fifth list, a candidate at 759 holding a domicile certificate and a candidate at 459 without one walked into the same first-year classroom. The women's row on that table has a marker where its rank should be, and the marker means the 30 places NLIU sets aside for women were never separately called on, because the ordinary queues had already seated enough of them. Read down the horizontal column entry by entry and you can watch it happen: candidate after candidate admitted on a Madhya Pradesh general tag with a W beside it, doing both jobs at once.

The cyber security degree is the other half of the picture and it closes later on every open row.

Two rows there deserve their own sentence. The Persons with Disability pool in this degree ran from 24,966 in the first list to 47,814 in the fifth, the deepest closing rank anywhere in NLIU's 2026 admission and roughly four times the equivalent figure in the B.A.LL.B. (Hons.); a pool of three seats inside a degree only science-stream candidates may enter is about as short as a CLAT queue gets. The state general pool closed at 2,278 against an all-India general bar of 698 in the same programme, more than three times as deep, and that gap is the strongest single argument anywhere in this admission for holding a Madhya Pradesh domicile certificate.

Postgraduate admission is decided by the CLAT paper for LL.M. candidates, and the Consortium prints its cut-offs in one combined table rather than one per specialisation.

All of these ranks come from a single admission year, and a harder or easier paper shifts the entire scale the next time. Use them to judge whether NLIU is worth a preference on your counselling form, not as a number to hit; a fresh table lands with every list the Consortium publishes.

NLIU publishes its placement record as a list of people rather than as a set of figures. The B.A.LL.B. (Hons.) placement page prints, for the graduating batches of 2025 and 2024, every placed graduate by name against the organisation that hired them, and links a placement brochure for each batch. What it never does is total the column: no offer count, no salary, no percentage. For anything aggregated you have to go to the annual return the university files to the government's ranking framework, which breaks the record out per programme.

The undergraduate row that most sources quote is the median of Rs 16,00,000, and it is real, but it describes 48 people out of a graduating class of 113. The column beside it is the one that changes the picture: 60 of that class were recorded as selected for higher studies, more than were placed, and the year before that the same comparison read 65 against 45. Two years earlier the higher-studies count was 10. A shift of that size across a single year is large enough that the reader should ask the university what it counted before treating it as a change in student behaviour, but on the filing as submitted, campus placement is not where most of an NLIU graduating class ends up.

The cyber law master's is the quiet outlier and it beats both law degrees on the proportion placed. MCLIS put 54 of 61 graduates into jobs in 2023-24 at a median of Rs 8,50,000, against the one-year LL.M.'s 19 of 55 at Rs 7,00,000, in that same filing. One honest wrinkle sits inside that number: the university entered the 2023-24 MCLIS median as 850000 in digits and as Eight Lac Forty Thousand in words, and the two do not agree, so the digits are what is reported above.

Go back to the named batch lists, though, and something the ranking return cannot show comes out: where those graduates actually went, and how narrow the funnel is. Every entry on the 2025 list is an associate's post, and almost all of them are with corporate law firms. Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas recurs on that list more often than any other employer, by a wide margin over the next name; Khaitan and Co accounts for seven of the entries and Jyoti Sagar Associates for five, with three going to Trilegal. Only two entries on the whole 2025 list sit outside a law firm. The 2024 list is spread wider, adding Desai and Diwanji, Argus Partners and DSK Legal among the firms and a run of in-house and public-sector destinations that the 2025 list has none of: Jio Financial Services, Wipro, Bharat Petroleum and the office of a sitting judge, all on that same page.

Two cautions go with those lists. They roll up who was placed, not who graduated, and the 2024 list runs a little shorter than the 48 placements the ranking return reports for the class that came out in 2023-24, which is the same cohort. And neither is the list in the CLAT 2027 brochure, which names AZB and Partners, Lakshmikumaran and Sridharan and Juris Corp among law firms, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deloitte and the ICICI companies among corporates, and SEBI, ONGC, BHEL, Indian Oil and HUDCO among public bodies. That brochure list carries no year against any name and reads as a record of where NLIU graduates have gone across the university's history, not as one season's roster.

Who to write to depends on which list you are on. Placement for the five-year degrees is run by a Placement Committee of four named faculty with five student co-ordinators publishing their own mobile numbers underneath, on the B.A.LL.B. placement page; the LL.M. and MCLIS are handled separately, each by a single faculty coordinator, on the Placement Coordination Committee page. The two pages do not name the same chair, so write to the one attached to your own programme rather than to whichever contact a search engine surfaces first.

The structural fact about admission to NLIU is a single line in its brochure: 50% of the seats in each category are horizontally reserved for candidates holding a Madhya Pradesh domicile certificate, in the CLAT 2027 brochure. It is compartmentalised, not carved out of the general pool, so the state share sits inside the Scheduled Caste queue, the Scheduled Tribe queue and the OBC queue as well as the open one. The Consortium's cut-off tables show the arithmetic working out exactly.

The Economically Weaker Section row is the one place the pattern stops. It carries no Madhya Pradesh sub-pool in either degree, and the brochure's footnote markers show why: the domicile footnote is attached to the Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, Other Backward Class and unreserved rows and to nothing else, EWS being a supernumerary quota rather than one of those categories. An EWS candidate therefore cannot improve a position at NLIU with a domicile certificate the way a general, SC, ST or OBC candidate can.

Those CLAT columns do not add up to the notified intake, and the gap is deliberate. The B.A.LL.B. (Hons.) is notified at 134 seats and the B.Sc. LL.B. (Hons.) at 68 in the CLAT 2027 brochure, and the Consortium fills fewer than that in each. The balance is NRI and NRI-sponsored seats, a supernumerary block for candidates from Jammu and Kashmir, and the foreign-national seats in each degree that are filled directly, all set out in that same brochure.

Women and Persons with Disability are counted twice over in each grid rather than added to it, and NLIU sets a different pair of figures for every programme in the CLAT 2027 brochure: 30 and five in the B.A.LL.B. (Hons.), 15 and three in the B.Sc. LL.B. (Hons.), 36 and six in the one-year master's. Of those six figures only the disability ones did any work in 2026. The women's reservation was marked deemed fulfilled in both five-year degrees and in the LL.M. on the Consortium's fifth allotment lists, so a woman applying to NLIU should plan on the ordinary category ranks and treat the set-aside as a floor that has not recently been reached.

The LL.M. grid is the largest of the three and the least commented on. It is notified at 120 seats, split 60 unreserved, 24 Scheduled Tribe, 19 Scheduled Caste and 17 Other Backward Class, with 30 of the unreserved and half of each reserved pool held for Madhya Pradesh, per the brochure and the postgraduate cut-off table. Hold that figure against the sanctioned LL.M. intake of 60 the university last reported for 2023-24 in its NIRF 2025 data submission: the notified grid is twice the size of the class the ranking framework has on record, so the postgraduate side is expanding faster than any published account of it.

The undergraduate side made that move first. Sanctioned five-year intake in the NIRF 2025 data submission holds at 122 through 2019-20 and 2020-21, rises to 134 for 2021-22, then jumps to 202 for 2022-23 and stays there. That single-year jump is almost exactly the 68 seats the CLAT 2027 brochure notifies for the B.Sc. LL.B. (Hons.), which is a fair indication of when the cyber security degree began counting. Four admission cycles put roughly two-thirds again on the first-year class, and nothing in the filing suggests it happened anywhere but the existing Kerwa Dam Road campus.

Rank 27 on a score of 57.64 is where the NIRF 2025 Law ranking places NLIU, and no other institution from Madhya Pradesh appears in that table at all.

A reputation score of 37.38, attached to the second national law school the country established, is the sharpest tension in NLIU's public record. The same table gives National Law School of India University 100.00 on that parameter and National Law University Delhi 92.05, and both of those are schools an NLIU applicant is routinely weighing this campus against. Whatever the perception parameter is picking up, founding order is not it, so an applicant deciding between NLIU and a younger law school gains nothing from the 1997 date and should look at this column instead.

The strongest parameter, graduation outcomes at 74.41 on that Law ranking, is also the one that describes a student's own five years rather than the institution's standing, which is a useful split for an applicant to hold: what happens to you here scores better than how the profession sees the place. The weakest, research and professional practice at 26.47, has a plain arithmetic behind it. Across 2023-24 NLIU booked five sponsored projects and two consultancy projects, worth Rs 17,48,487 and Rs 17,99,040 respectively, in its NIRF 2025 data submission, which is not a volume of externally funded work that a doctoral applicant can plan a thesis around.

Six named departments carry the teaching, and five of the six are legal fields while the sixth is not. The academics menu of NLIU's own site, as archived on its placements page, lists departments of intellectual property and business law, of constitutional and administrative law, of human rights, of criminal law, of cyber law and information security, and of humanities. The doctorate follows the same split: the CLAT 2027 brochure offers a Ph.D. in law, one in cyber law and information security, and one in social sciences covering political science, sociology, economics and English.

Fifteen Centres of Excellence sit across those departments and the CLAT 2027 brochure names all of them: parliamentary studies, alternative dispute resolution, business and commercial laws, research in international law, labour law, tribal studies and research, research in competition law and policy, law and economics, child and human rights, financial markets and regulatory systems, jurisprudence and legal theory, health law, the Rajiv Gandhi National Cyber Law Centre, postgraduate studies and research, and law and literature.

The cyber law centre is the one with a funding line behind it. That brochure records the Rajiv Gandhi National Cyber Law Centre as established with the support of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, and the same specialism reappears at every level of the institution: a five-year B.Sc. LL.B. in cyber security, the two-year MCLIS, a doctoral track in cyber law and information security, and, through the distance education wing, advanced certificate programmes in cyber laws and cyber forensics, in data privacy and protection law, and in information security compliances and IT audit, which the distance education menu lists alongside five more. A candidate who wants cyber law specifically can therefore enter that subject at NLIU at four separate levels, which is the concrete thing this campus offers that its rank does not convey.

Ten journals come out of that structure, one per field rather than one flagship for the whole institution, plus the biannual newsletter OJAS. The brochure lists the NLIU Law Review, the Indian Law Review, the Indian Arbitration Law Review, the NLIU Journal of Law and Technology, the NLIU Journal of Intellectual Property Law and the NLIU-CRIL Journal of International Law and Policy among them. Publishing at that rate has not registered in the research parameter, which reads 26.47 on the NIRF 2025 Law ranking; the framework counts externally funded projects and indexed output, and a house journal is neither.

International reach is real but narrow. The brochure records memoranda with six foreign universities, the International Institute of Air and Space Law at Leiden, McGill, Lucerne, Queensland University of Technology, Western Sydney and Waikato, and separately reports memoranda with 52 institutions, of which it names a handful, all Indian. NLIU is also a member of the International Association of Law Schools and the Asian Law Institute. What the brochure does not attach to any of those six is a student exchange, a semester abroad or a credit transfer, so a candidate choosing NLIU partly for an overseas term should ask the Registrar what each memorandum actually permits before counting on one.

Gyan Mandir is the name of the library, and everything NLIU says about it is qualitative. The CLAT 2027 brochure places it in a centrally air-conditioned building holding national and international journals across law, humanities and social sciences, and names LexisNexis, HeinOnline, JSTOR, Manupatra, AIR and SCC among the databases. Nowhere does a volume count, a reader-seat count or a subscription list appear, which for a law school approaching its thirtieth year is a conspicuous silence.

Follow the capital spending instead and it points somewhere else entirely. The library took Rs 55,94,427 of capital in 2023-24 while new equipment for laboratories took Rs 3,43,91,142, per the NIRF 2025 data submission. A law university with a laboratory line roughly six times its library line is a law university with a cyber security programme, and the accounts say so before the prospectus does.

Teaching space and the everyday campus are described plainly in the brochure: air-conditioned classrooms with projectors and smart boards, wireless internet across the campus, an air-conditioned computer lab with 50 machines on a 1 GBPS line, video conferencing, seminar halls and conference rooms, a guest house and a canteen. The largest single room is the Justice J. S. Verma Memorial Convention Centre, at 900 seats. For sport the brochure counts a gymnasium, badminton courts, table tennis and pool indoors, and tennis, volleyball and basketball courts outdoors. The whole campus is walled, under CCTV and watched round the clock by trained security personnel.

On disabled access NLIU stopped short of claiming full coverage, and where it stopped is worth reading. Of the three accessibility questions in its NIRF 2025 data submission, only one, on walking aids, wheelchairs and transport between blocks, got an unqualified yes. Lifts or ramps and accessible toilets each got the hedged option instead. That is an honest filing and it leaves a real unnamed remainder, and since a hostel allotment at NLIU is made building by building, a wheelchair user needs the Registrar's office to say which buildings sit in that remainder before accepting a room rather than after.

Six hostels for men and women are what the CLAT 2027 brochure counts, and the important contacts page names each one: Katyayan and Bhagirathi for men, Shipra and Narmada for women, a PG and research hostel, and a newer UG building housing both. Read the labels on that page and the accommodation splits by vintage as much as by gender, an old and a new block for each of the undergraduate sexes, with the newest building mixed. Every one of the six has a warden posted to it, two in most cases, under a chief warden for the whole set.

The mess is not a single central operation. Each hostel includes a dedicated mess facility, per the student hostels page, which is why the mess charge is billed as a hostel head rather than separately. That head, at Rs 47,600 a year in the brochure, is more than twice the undergraduate room rent of Rs 21,800 and is the largest single non-tuition item on the bill.

Postgraduates pay more for the room and the same for the food. The LL.M. room rent is Rs 33,100 against Rs 21,800 for the five-year degrees, with mess and amenities identical, in that same brochure. The rule that governs all of it is the footnote under the hostel block: charges are payable as listed or on actuals, whichever is higher.

Ragging is handled by two named bodies rather than one, an Anti Ragging Committee and a separate Anti Ragging Squad, each published in full with its members, its chairperson and a mobile number against every name on the university's anti-ragging page. The same professor chairs both. The committee reserves two places for students; the squad, which runs to ten names, is staff only, so a first-year with a problem at two in the morning is calling an adult, not a senior.

Forty-three is the headcount NLIU declared, and everything about the teaching here follows from how small that number is. The NIRF 2025 data submission puts 43 faculty members against a taught roll of 794 in the five-year block, 60 in the LL.M. and 127 in MCLIS, all in the same return.

Where that strain shows most is at the doctoral end, and the filing does not soften it. NLIU declared 77 full-time and eight part-time research scholars on the rolls, and against them an awards column for the three years to 2023-24 that totals one: a single full-time doctorate in 2021-22, then nothing in 2022-23 and nothing in 2023-24, in that same submission. A doctoral roll of that size against one degree conferred across three years is a completion record a prospective Ph.D. candidate has to ask about directly: how many candidates the intended supervisor already carries, and the date the last one submitted.

Hiring has been going on regardless, and the salary line is the proof. It reads Rs 8,18,05,425 for 2021-22, Rs 10,48,00,653 for 2022-23 and Rs 16,71,01,603 for 2023-24 in the same document, roughly doubling over two years alongside the new cyber security degree and the enlarged undergraduate class.

How the teaching is done is set out rather than implied. The CLAT 2027 brochure describes the case method, the Socratic method, case study work, problem-based learning and clinical education, and it attaches a specific assessment load to every subject on the B.A.LL.B. (Hons.): a written problem-based paper, a research project, a presentation of that project and a viva. Four assessments per subject is the load a candidate should be comparing when they compare NLIU with a law school that examines once a semester, and it is the same load the ranking filing's 43 faculty are carrying.

NLIU's alumni pages are a registration wall, not a roll of honour. The site carries a separate alumni page for each of its five programme tracks, and what fills them is whatever graduates have chosen to submit themselves: a batch year, an occupation and a name. The LL.M. page holds two such entries, one a public prosecutor and one an assistant professor; the MCLIS page holds two more, in consulting and in privacy management; the B.A.LL.B. page holds one, a 2001 graduate now practising, listed under a Madhya Pradesh judicial-service result. The Ph.D. and other-courses pages return "No Results Found".

Career destinations are described elsewhere, and there without names. The CLAT 2027 brochure has graduates working with senior advocates in the Supreme Court and High Courts, some enrolled as Advocates on Record, some sitting as judges in different states, several selected for the Supreme Court's clerkship programme, and others who went on to Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia, London, New York University and the National University of Singapore on Commonwealth and Erasmus Mundus scholarships. Not one of those sentences carries a person, a year or a post.

The gap between the two is the point. Lists of well-known NLIU graduates circulate on coaching and listing sites, and a reader can check almost none of them against anything the university has published, because what the university has published is five self-service pages holding a handful of entries between them. The Alumni Affairs Cell is a student body that works with the NLIU Alumni Association, runs an alumni meet every two years with chapters through the year in different parts of the country, and publishes a newsletter. Ask it for introductions in your intended field; do not expect a directory.

Convocation is the one recurring event NLIU dates publicly, and its convocations page carries three of them: the thirteenth in March 2024, the twelfth in February 2023 and the eleventh in February 2022. February or March, a year apart, is therefore when a family should expect to travel to Bhopal.

While an admission season is running, the document to watch is not on the university's site at all. NLIU's 2026 undergraduate and postgraduate seats were settled across five provisional allotment lists published by the Consortium, and each of those lists carries two things worth reading in order: its own cut-off table, and a status column against the previous round's admitted candidates marking each seat as provisionally admitted or vacant, as the fifth B.A.LL.B. list shows. Watch the vacancies in your own category rather than the cut-off; the cut-off tells you where the round finished, and the vacant rows tell you whether the next one will move at all.

The comparison that decides most applications is against the other national law universities, and on the 2025 law table they surround NLIU on both sides.

Age has not held its place. The national law universities ranked above NLIU run from NLSIU at rank 1 down to Dr. Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University at rank 21, and NLSIU is the only one of them older than NLIU. Two parameters carry most of that gap, and only one of them is the reputation problem people expect. NLIU scores 61.44 on teaching, learning and resources, against a band of 86.99 to 91.35 across the top five, and 37.38 on perception. The first of those is a resourcing gap rather than a reputational one, and it is the one a fee-paying student meets daily. Where it holds its own is on outcomes: graduation outcomes at 74.41 is within a few points of Chanakya National Law University's 79.23 at rank 17, on the same Law ranking.

The admission consequence is worth stating in ranks. A general-category candidate needed All India Rank 108 to hold a five-year seat at NLSIU by the third CLAT 2026 round, per the Consortium's NLSIU allotment list, against 459 at NLIU after five rounds on its own fifth list. That is a wide band, and for a candidate whose rank lands in it, NLIU plus a Madhya Pradesh domicile certificate is a very different proposition from NLIU without one.

Inside the state there is nothing to compare it with. NLIU is the only Madhya Pradesh institution of any kind in the NIRF 2025 Law ranking, so a student who wants a nationally ranked law school without leaving the state has exactly one option.

The address NLIU prints in the footer of every page of its own site, including its placements page, is National Law Institute University, Kerwa Dam Road, Bhopal 462044, and the CLAT 2027 brochure prints the same one under the Registrar's name. The switchboard is published as a pair of numbers on one line, so a call that fails on the first should be retried on the second before anyone concludes the line is dead.

Admission questions go to the Registrar rather than to a separate admissions desk, and the brochure gives nliu@nliu.ac.in as the address for that office. Individual staff addresses are masked on the university's own pages by an email obfuscator, so writing to the institutional line is the reliable route.

At a glance

Quick facts