Telangana HC Nixes Tech Colleges Plea for Higher Intake

Hyderabad: A division bench of the Telangana High Court, comprising Chief Justice Alok Aradhe and Justice J. Sreenivas Rao, ruled that Section 20 of the Telangana Education Act was intra vires and that it did not want to interfere in the provision as the Supreme Court had upheld it.

Section 20 mentions that the competent authority shall from time to time conduct a survey to identify the education needs of the locality under its jurisdiction and notify in the prescribed manner calling for applications to establish educational institutions.

The bench was dealing with a batch of petitions filed by some engineering colleges like MGR Educational Society and CMR College of Engineering and Technology, seeking recognition as a validly affiliated institution for increasing their admissions into CSE, data sciences, AI and other courses. The government has rejected their plea to curb unhealthy competition among educational institutions.

Advocate General A. Sudershan Reddy brought to the notice of the court that validity of Section 20 was previously challenged and was upheld by the Supreme Court in the case of ‘Government of Andhra Pradesh v J.B. Educational Society.’

Considering it, the division bench said that it was trite law that once the validity of a provision was upheld by the Supreme Court all grounds must be presumed to have been considered and fresh litigation challenging validity of the same provision on some additional grounds would be barred by principle of res judicata (matter judged).

The bench directed the registry to let the writ petitions be listed before the single judge on Thursday in regard to other reliefs sought by the colleges.