The placement record at Chanakya National Law University is hardly anything to write home about but the number of aspiring lawyers seeking admission to it keeps increasing every year.

On May 12, around 1,750 students — around 500 more than the previous year — appeared for the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) at two centres in Patna.

Chanakya National Law University (CNLU), the 10th national law university in India, is the only one in the state that offers an integrated five-year BA LLB (honours) programme. The rush of students seeking admission to it is proof of how popular the course is.

“Earlier, joining the legal profession meant only practising at the Bar. Now, it has changed a lot,” said Saurav Singh, a final-year student of the university.

Avenues are plenty and the syllabus of the law university has been tailored to meet the changing demands of the profession. Now, law students have to study IT and corporate law along with criminal psychology.

Despite these innovations, the CNLU has not been able to provide campus placements to its students.

A third-year student, who did not want to be named, said: “For the first batch which passed out in 2011, the placement was less than 10 per cent. In 2012, it increased to 40 per cent but this year, it has again dropped to 30 per cent.”

The variable placement record is the greatest challenge for the university administration. “For any new institution, it takes time to settle and grow. It is the same for CNLU,” said varsity registrar S.P. Singh.

As evidence of the increasing popularity of the university, Singh said: “For the last two batch that we have taken in, there are many more students from other states.”

Lack of placements is among a slew of problems that the university has encountered and overcome since its inception in 2006. To begin with, the university did not have a campus. It functioned out of AN Sinha Institute of Social Studies. Only in 2010 did it shift to its new campus at Mithapur. In the initial stages, it faced lack of infrastructure and shortage of teachers. But the university surmounted all such obstacles.

As the university gets ready for a new academic year, its hopes and aspirations, too, take on bright colour for the future.