Retirement age binding on AICTE institutions: Karnataka HC

The High Court has quashed a memo issued by Siddaganga Institute of Technology seeking to retire its staff.

Justice M Nagaprasanna held that regulations of All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) are binding on the institutions governed by it.

The petitioner G R Bharath Sai Kumar, working as a professor at Siddaganga Institute of Technology, challenged the memo contending that he is entitled to continue in service in terms of the guidelines of AICTE Act, 1987, which depict that the age of retirement of a professor will be 65 years.

The institute claimed that it is an unaided educational institution and the determination of age of superannuation is a matter of policy of the institute. The government submitted that the age of retirement of employees of the institute is not regulated by it.

The court observed that different institutions having different ages of retirement, despite being governed by the same provisions of the AICTE Act, Norms and Standards, is not the purport of the mandate of the legislation.

“Uniformity in application of statute in every case will drive away arbitrariness in action and would be in consonance with Article 14 of the Constitution of India, failing which, every institute that is governed by a solitary regulation would become free to adopt service conditions at their whim and fancy,” the court said.

The court allowed the petition citing the Constitution Bench judgment in the case of Unni Krishnan, with regard to binding nature of the Regulations of AICTE upon the institutes it governs.

The court set aside the memo issued by the institute on December 3, 2019, and said the petitioner is entitled to continue in service till he attains the age of 65 years. The court said that the petitioner is entitled to all consequential benefits that would flow from quashing of the memo.

The petitioner was appointed as a lecturer in April 1985 in the department of mechanical engineering. The memo issued in December 2019 declared the names of the staff who would retire in the year 2020 and the petitioner’s name figured in the list.