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Om Sai Punya Educational and Social Welfare Society v. All India Council for Technical Education

Writ Petition (Civil) · 2017 INSC 745Decided 16 Aug 2017
Writ Petition (Civil) No. 571 of 2017
Justice Dipak Misra · Justice A.M. Khanwilkar

Background

The petitioner-society had applied in February 2017 to AICTE for approval to start a new college, "Anant Institute of Business Studies" (AIBS), for the 2017-18 academic year. Various AICTE committees reviewed the proposal between March and April 2017, and the petitioners feared delay, so they filed this writ petition seeking a mandamus directing AICTE to immediately grant the Letter of Approval. During scrutiny it emerged that AIBS shared land and facilities with another institute the same society was also trying to set up, a fact not disclosed in the original application, and AICTE's inspection team had even been obstructed from entering the site on an earlier visit.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that the petitioners were not entitled to the relief claimed. It found that the petitioners had concealed the shared-land/shared-facilities issue in their original application and had only withdrawn the competing institute's proposal in July 2017, after which AICTE approved AIBS, but only for the 2018-19 academic year, not 2017-18 as the petitioners wanted. Given this conduct, the Court declined to use its special powers under Article 142 to retroactively treat the approval as covering 2017-18. The writ petition was dismissed with costs of Rs. 50,000 payable to the respondents within four weeks.

Lesson Learnt

Concealing material facts (here, that two proposed institutions shared the same land and facilities) from a regulator can defeat an otherwise urgent claim for relief: courts are reluctant to use extraordinary constitutional powers to help a party that was not candid with the authority it was dealing with.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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