The National Law School of India University, which has pioneered and developed an integrated five-year BA LLB (honours) degree that transformed Indian legal education, has now come up with a three-year (honours) BA course with an option of an additional fourth year.

The first cohort of the programme will be admitted in July 2025, the NLSIU said.

“We are looking to develop something that is responsive to 2025, but is completely different,” the NLSIU Vice Chancellor Sudhir Krishnaswamy said at the launch of the programme.

He said the university will teach the social sciences and humanities programme with a ‘strong professional orientation’.

“So we are very clear in our minds as we start that the BA degree is the only degree that a student will need. It’s a terminal degree,” he explained.

“The BA programme is an organic development from 35 years of experience in offering the integrated 5-year BA LLB (Hons.) programme,” the University said in a statement.

According to the University, the course builds on existing faculty expertise that can be delivered without having to develop an entirely new faculty.

“The NLS BA (Hons.) programme has been developed by the University’s Faculty Teams from August 2023 and was approved by the governing bodies earlier in 2024,” it said.

Before launching the programme, it had held an extensive stakeholder consultation with eminent academics and practitioners who advised on the curriculum.

The BA programme is open to all candidates who have completed their higher secondary education, which means 10+2 or equivalent.

The general category must have a minimum of 55 per cent aggregate marks while for the SC/ST category, the minimum aggregate marks is 45 per cent.

Candidates in their final year of higher secondary education may also apply, provided they meet the academic criteria upon completion.

An integral part of the curriculum is the opportunity to learn a selection of Indian languages.

Further, the students will engage in hands-on learning through practice courses in emerging fields like Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, film-making, business consulting, user experience research, digital journalism, creative writing, entrepreneurship, policy advocacy and analysis.

Students are also required to complete at least one internship of a duration of at least one month in every year of the programme.

Students invited to the fourth year on the basis of their performance in the first three years, will write a 20,000-word dissertation based on original research.

The four-year-track students will graduate with a BA (Honours with Research) degree.

The maximum intake for the NLS BA (Honours) programme for the academic year 2025-26 is 60 and only students qualifying as per the selection criteria will be admitted.

Admission to the programme will be through an all-India written admissions test, which is the NLSAT-BA.

The NLSIU said it has released the registration of interest form on Tuesday.

The applications will be opened in the first week of January next year and the application deadline is March 23. The NLSAT-BA exam will be held on April 27, 2025 and the final admission list will be out in the end of May. The classes would begin from July 1, 2025.