The Madras High Court has restrained the AICTE from taking any coercive action against self-financing engineering colleges for not subscribing to e-journals, subject to their subscribing to DELNEST / INDEST for the academic year 2015-16.
Justice T.S. Sivagnanam passed the interim order on a petition by the Consortium of Self-Financing Professional Arts and Science Colleges in Tamil Nadu.
The organisation filed the petition on behalf of its members who have also established engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu.
In the petition filed through counsel R. Natarajan, the consortium said that for 2012-13, the AICTE issued a fresh approval process handbook wherein certain new conditions were included.
One was that the institutions were compelled to subscribe to e-journals through a particular publisher with pre-fixed price by the council without consulting the stakeholders.
An interim order was still in force and the main writ petition was still pending.
There were many journals available as open source. Therefore, going by the AICTE’s direction to procure e-journals, as mentioned in the approval process 2015-16, was unacceptable.
Justice Sivagnanam said that in the light of the earlier order and considering the pendency of that writ petition, he was issuing a similar direction in the present writ petition.
Court says it cannot force self-financing engineering colleges to subscribe to
e-journals
