‘Orders not needed to restrain colleges from printing pamphlets’

The Madras High Court has said no order needs to be passed on a petition seeking to restrain the Anna University from permitting its affiliated colleges from making any publication, including pamphlets, about their academic performance pursuant to the pass percentage statistics of institutions put up in the university’s website.

On June 14, the First Bench headed by Acting Chief Justice R.K.Agrawal had directed the university to publish the pass percentage statistics of institutions affiliated to it for 2011-12 on its website. In a petition, the Association of Management of Coimbatore Anna University Affiliated Colleges said that in the wake of the court order, several advertisements had been made by colleges claiming that they were No.1 as per the ranking assigned by the university. These advertisements were misleading.

The petitioner said that marks secured by individual colleges were never featured as a criterion for ranking any college. Several factors were involved and they included the ability of the teaching faculty, papers they presented and the infrastructure in the institution.

The petitioner’s counsel V. Raghavachari said a particular college had issued an advertisement in a Tamil daily claiming that it was “number one” in discipline, university results, rank, infrastructure and placement. Such misleading advertisements would affect the welfare of students.

In its order, the Bench said that in its June 14 order itself it had indicated that the court had not gone into the merits of the submissions and also not expressing any opinion with regard to the performance of the private engineering colleges affiliated to the Anna University. In such view of the matter, the Bench said, no orders needed to be passed in the present petition. If the petitioner was aggrieved that the advertisement was misleading, it was open to him to take appropriate action as per law.

The Bench treated the petition as closed.