In a six-page letter dated August 22 by senior advocate Y.R. Sadasiva Reddy, co-chairman, BCI has made several allegations concerning the creation of BCI Trust PEARL-FIRST, the transfer of around ₹150 crore from BCI funds to the trust has been made. He made allegation regarding demands for contributions from law colleges as “contributions” to the PEARL-FIRST trust, and the handling of funds generated through the All-India Bar Examination (AIBE). The institutional controversy surrounding the creation of BCI Trust PEARL-FIRST and allegations that the original BCI Trust was rendered defunct. He alleged that the audit reports of the PEARL-FIRST trust has never been placed before a meeting of the BCI since the trust’s inception in 2020. The original BCI Trust wan created in 1974. It was allowed to fall into disuse during his tenure and was replaced by BCI Trust PEARL-FIRST, whose trustees, he alleged, were chosen by him.
The text of the letter is as under:
To,
Shri Manan Kumar Mishra,
Senior Advocate,
Chairman, Bar Council of India,
21, Rouse Avenue Institutional Area,
Near Bal Bhavan, New Delhi 110 002.
Sub: Demand for your immediate resignation from the office of Chairman, Bar Council of India, and for an independent enquiry into the matters set out herein - regarding.
Sir,
I address this communication to you not as an adversary, but as an elected Member of the Bar Council of India, presently holding the office of Co- Chairman, and as a member of this profession for over three decades. I do so with considerable anguish, and only after long reflection, having satisfied myself that silence on my part would amount to a dereliction of the trust reposed in me by the advocates of this country.
The Bar Council of India is not the personal estate of any individual. It is a statutory body constituted under the Advocates Act, 1961, holding funds contributed by lakhs of advocates and exercising regulatory power over the entry of every young person into this profession. Every rupee it holds is held in trust. Every power it exercises is a power conferred by Parliament for the benefit of the Bar, and not for the benefit of the person who happens to occupy the Chair.
It is my considered view, formed on the basis of what I have myself witnessed in the meetings of this Council, that under your Chairmanship the Council has drifted very far from that standard. I therefore call upon you, in the plainest terms, to tender your resignation from the office of Chairman of the Bar Council of India forthwith. My reasons are set out below.
GROUNDS ON WHICH YOUR RESIGNATION IS DEMANDED
I. Appointments to the establishment of the Council made without any transparent process of recruitment
Through
the whole of my tenure as a Member of this Council, I proceeded on the
assumption that appointments to the establishment of the Bar Council of
India were made after due advertisement, due scrutiny of qualifications,
and due observance of the norms binding upon a statutory body. I never
had occasion to question it, because I never imagined it could be
otherwise. On examining the list of persons presently employed by the
Council, together with their particulars, I find a pattern that no
responsible Member can overlook. A striking proportion of the staff are
persons connected to you personally, several of them being members of,
or related to, your own family. I am unable to find, in any record
placed before this Council, a single advertisement, a single selection
committee proceeding, or a single comparative merit list justifying
these appointments.
II. The rendering defunct of the Bar Council of India Trust and the diversion of Council funds to a newly created trust
The Bar Council of India Trust was an institution of standing. It was the body through which this Council discharged its historic contribution to legal education in this country, including the founding of the National Law School of India at Bengaluru. That Trust was, over a period, allowed to fall into disuse. It did not become defunct by accident.
In its place, a new trust styled "BCI Trust PEARL First" came to be registered on 17.09.2020, with trustees of your choosing. Thereafter, a resolution was moved in this Council for the transfer of a sum of the order of Rs. 150 crores of the funds of the Bar Council of India to that newly created trust. I placed my opposition to that resolution on record at the time, as did certain other Members. Our objection was overridden. The transfer went through. Distinguished persons, including sitting and former Judges, were thereafter associated with the trust, lending it a respectability that the manner of its creation does not deserve.
The funds of the Bar Council of India are the contributions of ordinary advocates, most of them in the district courts, most of them struggling. I know of no provision of the Advocates Act, 1961 which permits the corpus of a statutory regulator to be transferred to a private trust registered by its own Chairman. None of the members of the Bar Council have ever seen a copy of the Trust Deed.
III. Contributions demanded from law colleges seeking approval or renewal of approval
Persistent and credible complaints have reached me, from more than one State, that managements of new law colleges approaching the Bar Council of India for approval, and managements of existing colleges approaching it for renewal, are being required to make "contributions" to the said trust, in amounts ranging from Rs. 25 lakhs to Rs. 50 lakhs to Rs. 1 crore. If this is correct and I have received nothing from your office to indicate that it is not it is a matter of the utmost gravity. The power of approval and renewal under the Advocates Act and the Rules of Legal Education is a regulatory power. It is not a licence to raise funds. A regulator that receives money from the entity it regulates, in temporal proximity to the decision it must take on that entity, has destroyed the very foundation of its own authority. The consequence is visible in the state of legal education in this country: colleges that ought never to have been approved continue year after year, and thousands of young persons are sold a degree that equips them for nothing.
IV. Key positions in institutions run by the Council held by persons of your own family
The same pattern extends to the educational institution or institutions established and run under the aegis of the Council and the said trust. Persons occupying key administrative positions there are, once again, drawn from your family. The purpose for which such an institution was established was never explained to this Council in any meaningful terms, nor was any feasibility study, budget or governance structure ever placed before us for deliberation.
I may add that the very propriety of the Bar Council of India simultaneously regulating law colleges and operating one of its own has now been questioned before the Hon'ble Supreme Court of India. That such a question should arise at all is a measure of how far institutional propriety has been allowed to erode.
V. The direction issued against the graduating batch of NALSAR University of Law, without any material being placed before the Council
On 13.08.2026, a communication was issued from your office directing the State Bar Councils not to enrol, until further orders, the graduating batch. of 2026 of the NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad. It was accompanied by observations questioning the fitness of those students to enter this. profession. The occasion was a representation by some students of that University concerning the invitation extended to a distinguished guest for their convocation that is to say, the expression of an opinion.
That direction was issued without the material being placed before the Bar Council of India, without the Council deliberating upon it, and without any resolution of this Council authorising it. I was not consulted. To the best of my knowledge, the Council as a body was not consulted. The direction was withdrawn within hours in the face of nationwide condemnation. It was described by the President of the Supreme Court Bar Association as illegal and disproportionate. It drew the disapproval of the Hon'ble Supreme Court itself. On 15.08.2026 you issued a letter expressing regret. The expression of regret, though belated, is not the point. The point is that the office of Chairman was used to threaten an entire graduating batch of law students - young men and women with no power and no voice - with exclusion from the profession, as a reprisal for having held an opinion. The right of a citizen to express a view is not forfeited on admission to a law school. A body that exists to defend the independence of the Bar cannot itself punish independence of thought. That single act, in my respectful but firm view, has done more damage to the standing of this Council than anything else in its history, and it is by itself sufficient ground for you to demit office.
VI. Encouragement of factionalism within the State Bar Councils
It has been a consistent feature of your tenure that factions are created and sustained within the State Bar Councils, that one group is favoured over another, and that orders are thereafter caused to be passed from the Bar Council of India in aid of the favoured group. Orders of this nature. have issued from time to time, frequently without notice to the affected side and without the matter being placed before the Council for deliberation.
The State Bar Councils are autonomous statutory bodies. They are not to be governed through patronage. Many of them have been paralysed by disputes that would never have survived a week had they not been sustained from Delhi.
VII. Continuance in the office of Chairman for more than a decade
The office of Chairman of the Bar Council of India is an elected office with a term of two years. That term reflects a deliberate legislative and institutional choice: that the office should rotate, that no individual should become identified with the institution, and that the Council should be periodically renewed.
You have held that office continuously since 2012, and were returned for a further consecutive term in 2025. This is without precedent. When elections to the office fall due, the arrangements are so managed that the outcome is a foregone conclusion. An elected office that has one occupant for fourteen years has ceased, in any real sense, to be an elected office.
VIII. The confidence of the Bar has been lost
The matter is no longer confined to this Council. Advocates have assembled in protest outside the office of the Bar Council of India itself, demanding your resignation and pointing to the absence of the most elementary welfare measures for the Bar an Advocates Protection Act, insurance cover, transparent inspection of law colleges. Young advocates, who have the most to gain from a functioning Council and the most to lose from a captured one, have led those protests. Members of the Bar in your own State and your own district have joined in seeking your departure. The Student Bar Councils of the National Law Universities have publicly declined to share a platform with the Chairman of the Bar Council of India. When the regulator of a profession is publicly repudiated by the profession it regulates, by the students it is meant to nurture, and by the courts before which it appears, the question of its Chairman's continuance is no longer a matter of personal preference. It is a question of institutional survival.
DEMAND
In the premises aforesaid, I call upon you:
(a) to tender your resignation from the office of Chairman, Bar Council of India, forthwith, and in any event within fifteen (15) days of receipt of this letter;
(b) to convene, in the meanwhile, a Special Meeting of the Bar Council of India for consideration of each of the matters set out above, with the relevant records placed before every Member in advance;
(c) to cause a special audit of the accounts of the Bar Council of India and of BCI Trust PEARL - First, from the date of its registration to date, to be conducted by an independent firm empanelled with the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, and to cause the report to be circulated to every Member and published;
(d) to direct that, with immediate effect, no contribution, donation or payment of any description shall be received from any law college, university or management by the Council or by any trust or body connected with it; and
(e) to place on the website of the Council the complete staff position referred to in Ground I above.
I hold no personal animosity towards you. I have served alongside you on this Council for a decade. It is precisely because I have watched this institution from within for that period that I am able to say, with a clear conscience, that it will not recover while you remain in the Chair. There are able persons in this Council capable of restoring it. Standing down now, of your own accord, is the one course still open to you that would be to your credit.
The Bar of this country deserves better than what it is presently receiving from its own Council. I ask you to allow it that opportunity.
Yours faithfully,
(Y. R. SADASIVA REDDY),
Senior Advocate, Member and Co-Chairman Bar Council of India
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