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Abstract
Legal education is an instrunment for social design. It is a technique, arena and platform for rational, orderly and non-violent settlement of disputes and handling of conflicts. The establishment of high quality legal education is a pre requisite condition to produce high quality advocates, Judicial officers and Government law officers. The need for such education is felt not only in the developing and underdeveloped countries but also in the developed nations who have deemed it necessary to assess and revise curricula and methodologies of law courses with an objective to update them for meeting new challenges and needs of their societies. Though Indian legal education has seen rapid growth after independence, there still exist a large gap in the need for and the availability of legal representation. In cases where parties cannot afford a lawyer and are provided legal services by the state, the quality of that legal representation is often questionable. Therefore the need for clinical legal education, or establishing legal aid clinics at law schools, where law students can provide legal advice to indigent people cannot be over emphasized. Under this model, law students would be trained to be the productive members of the community to address the pressing demand for social justice in the country. Therefore, law schools in India do have legal aid clinics but the major challenge is that there is a lack of an institutionalized approach towards clinical legal education. There is an urgent need to formalise clinical legal education programs in Indian law schools both for purposes of providing social justice as well as to enhance skill-based training to law students and much-needed legal services to the poor. This paper highlights the issues involved in providing clinical legal education to law students as part of academic curricula and also suggest remedies to overcome such challenges.