The Madras High Court Bench here on Monday allowed a writ appeal filed by Anna University, holding that it was right in denying provisional affiliation to Dhaya College of Engineering, run by the M.K. Alagiri Educational Trust, at Sivarakottai near here.
A Division Bench of Justices M. Jaichandren and R. Mahadevan reversed a decision taken on July 1 by a single judge, who had allowed a writ petition filed by the college and held that the university had been denying affiliation to it since 2011 with a mala fide intention.
The Bench said that “no evidence has been furnished before this court to establish the claim of the petitioner-college that the rejection of its application for affiliation is due to bias or mala fide motive.”
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It said the college could not claim affiliation as a matter of right without rectifying defects, including its failure to obtain the structural stability certificate from a Superintending Engineer of the Public Works Department, as pointed out by the university. The other defects pointed out by Advocate-General A.L. Somayaji and Government Advocate M. Rajarajan included the failure to renew the licence issued by a health inspector, the absence of a valid certificate for electrical installations and the dispute over the ownership of the land.
Writing the judgment, Mr. Justice Jaichandren said: “It cannot be said the grant of affiliation by the university… should happen automatically following the grant of approval by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). The norms prescribed for the approval by the AICTE are different from those for grant of affiliation to the petitioner-college by the university. As such, the contentions of the petitioner-college cannot be countenanced.”
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The Bench said the single judge was not right in directing the university to grant affiliation to the college for the academic year 2014-15 just because the writ petition filed by it for 2013-14 had been pending for long. “Such a course adopted by the single judge cannot be held to be correct in the eye of law as the petitioner-college is required to submit a fresh application for every academic year for affiliation.”