Devarakonda Edl. Society, Petitioner v. All India Council for Technical Education and others, Respondents.
B.K. SOMASEKHARA, J.
Constitution of India, Article 14 - All India Council for Technical Education Act (1987), Section 23 - All India Council for Technical Education (Grant of approval for starting new technical institutions, introduction of courses or programmes and approval of intake capacity of seats for courses or programmes) Regulations (1994), Regn.8(10) - Technical institution -Starting of - Refusal to grant approval - Validity – Two reports by expert committee - Order refusing approval passed on view of Chairman of expert committee in second report and not on view of committee with all its members – Reports contradicting with each other - Deficiencies noted in first report complied with ... - Order to withhold approval must be considered to be arbitrary.
... While rendering decision, council acts as quasi-judicial authority - It is required to act objectively, judicially and judiciously ... No opportunity given to applicant to explain and fulfil deficiencies – Council has violated principles of natural justice. (Source: AIR 1997 Andhra Pradesh 389)
Shahabuddin's Recommendation to NCERT On Education of Muslim Girls,
1 December, 1997
The religious and social sensitivities of the Muslim community have to be kept in view while promoting education of Muslim girls - for example, its general aversion to co-education beyond the age of 10 or 12 i.e. V or VII class, the need for high standard and socially relevant education at the secondary and higher secondary level because most parents would adopt it as the terminal point, the need to teach Mother Tongue in Urdu-speaking areas and to use it as medium of instruction, as far as possible, the need for residential facilities, specially at the block level because Muslim girls beyond a certain age will not be permitted to walk to the schools from their villages and the need to curb the imposition of a Hindu religious ethos in the school culture.
Stephen David On C.M. Ibrahim's Engineering College
It has neither a principal nor any infrastructure; there's only a shell of a building with not even a name-plate. There's just one thing that the Hazirat Khwaja Quthubuddin Bakhtiar Kaki (HKBK) College of Engineering does have: students. And when 180 young hopefuls landed up at 81 Benson Cross Road, Benson Town, Bangalore - the address they had been given – they discovered a sprawling pink house called Bagh-e-Inayat, the residence of Union Civil Aviation Minister and Janata Dal leader C.M. Ibrahim. The students were allotted seats in HKBK after they cleared the Karnataka Government- run Common Entrance Test. They have already paid Rs. 7,500 as admission fee. Their worry is: where do we go from here? ... Ibrahim, who is also the chairperson of the Karnataka State Muslim Federation (KSMF) that runs the HKBK, admits: "We have not even selected a principal so far" ... Having recently applied for minority status for HKBK, the KSMF is hoping ... to control admissions to 50 per cent of the seats (as a non-minority institutions, it can control only the 5% NRI quota seats). And that means money.
Directorate of Technical Education (DTE) insists that there is no question of changing the "private unaided engineering college" status accorded to HKBK in September. In fact ... it asked the HKBK management to start courses without waiting for the minority status, even warning it of derecognition ... In September, 1996 the KSMF sought permission to open an engineering college. A local inspection committee (LIC) of the Bangalore University checked the college building, which even today is far from complete; a second LIC from the DTE visited the site in January, 1997. Soon after came (Karnataka Government's clearance) on the basis of the LIC reports, the State Government issued an essentiality certificate for the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) ... The AICTE - headed by T. Rame Gowda, a former Karnataka University vice-chancellor personally hand-picked by Ibrahim's mentor H.D. Deve Gowda ... sent its own inspection team in June 1997. The team asked the management to deposit the mandatory Rs. 50 lakh in a nationalised bank besides paying Rs.50,000 as inspection fee ..
Considering the condition of the building and the absence of a principal, it is unlikely though that the HKBK college will take off in the near future. ... (Source: The India Today, 17 November, 1997)
