Case: Principal, Patna College, Patna, And Others Vs. Kalyan Srinivas Raman

1. This appeal raises a short question about the construction of Regulation 4 of the Regulations framed by the Academic Council of appellant No. 3, the Patna University, under Section 34 (b) of the Patna University Act, 1951 (Bihar Act XXV of 1951). The respondent Kalyan Srinivas Raman was a student who appeared at and passed the test examination held by the Patna College for sending up students for the University examination B. A. Part I. His name was shown in the list of candidates who were eligible to appear for the said University Examination and this list was published on March 26, 1965, by the college authorities. On March 29, 1965, however, a notice was put up on the notice-board by appellant No. 1, the Principal of the Patna College, indicating that the respondent was not eligible to be sent up for the said University Examination, 1965 and that his roll number had been included in the list published earlier due to a clerical mistake. The respondent felt aggrieved by this notice and filed a writ petition in the Patna High Court on Sunday, the 18th April 1965 and presented it to the learned Chief Justice of the High Court at his residence. By this writ petition, the respondent prayed for a writ of mandamus or for any appropriate order or direction for quashing and cancelling the notice issued by appellant No. 1 on the 29th March 1965: he further prayed for an appropriate order or direction to appellant No. 1; the Vice-Chancellor of the Patna University appellant No. 2; and appellant No. 3 to permit him to appear at the said University Examination.2. The learned Chief Justice received the writ petition and directed that the same should be heard by a Bench of two Honble Judges of the said High Court at night. Accordingly, the Division Bench heard the said writ petition at the residence of one of the two learned Judges and passed an interim order admitting the writ petition and directing that pending its hearing the respondent should be permitted to appear at the said Examination, but that his result should not be published until disposal of his application. It appears that the writ petition itself had not been sworn to and no vakalatnama had been filed when it was presented to the learned Chief Justice and was subsequently admitted by the Division Bench. After passing the interim order, the Division Bench directed that the respondent could get the affidavit sworn and vakalatnama filed the next day.3. In obedience to the said interim order, appellant No. 1 forwarded the respondents application to appellant No. 3, though he made it clear that the respondent had not attended adequate number of practical classes and his record of practical work was not satisfactory and as such, he did not fulfil the requirements of the relevant Regulations. As a consequence, the respondent was allowed to appear at the said Examination.4. The appellants then appeared before the High Court and resisted the respondents claim. They urged that the relevant Regulations did not justify the respondents contention that he was eligible to appear at the said Examination and they contended that the impugned notice issued by appellant No. 1 was fully justified.5. The learned Judges who heard the writ petition have, however, rejected the contentions raised by the appellants in regard to the construction of the relevant regulations and have held that under the said regulations, it was obligatory on appellant No. 2 to have considered the question whether the deficiency in the respondents attendance in the practicals of Geography should be condoned or not. That is why the High Court has directed that a writ in the nature of certiorari should be issued to quash the impugned notice, and that a writ in the nature of mandamus should be issued to the appellants directing them to act in accordance with Regulation 5 in the light of the construction placed by the High Court on the said regulation. The High Court has also ordered that if the shortage in the respondents attendance was condoned by appellant No. 2, the respondents result in the examination which he had taken under the interim order of the Court will be published; otherwise his appearance at the said examination will have to be ignored. It is against this order that the appellants have come to this Court by special leave;

Reasoning:
In dealing with regulation 4, it is necessary to bear in mind two broad considerations. The first consideration is that the modern methodology of education in all civilised countries attaches considerable importance to the tutorials and the practical work done by the student in addition to attending lectures. The tendency in modern times is to bring the students into direct personal contact with the tutors so as the enable the tutors to guide and coach the students individually as far as may be possible. For that purpose, small groups of students are formed who are placed under different tutors for different subjects. The importance of practicals has also been well recognised and education does no longer depend merely upon lectures as it used to do at one time in our country. The second consideration which may not be irrelevant is that eversince the present regulations were brought into force in 1961, appellant No. 3 and colleges within its jurisdiction appear to have consistently interpreted Regulation 4 in the manner suggested by appellant No. 3. It is of course true that the two considerations to which we have just referred cannot materially govern the construction of the regulation; that must inevitably depend upon the words used by the regulation itself; but in interpreting the words, these two considerations may not be treated asHigh Court has, no doubt, made an emphatic finding that the relevant words used in this regulation admit of only one construction, and that is that the requirement of 75 per cent attendance has to be judged by reference to lectures, tutorials and/or practicals all taken together. We are unable to agree. It seems to us that in the context, it is more reasonable to hold that the said requirement must be read disjunctively; and so, it must be satisfied by the student by reference to lectures, tutorials and/or practicals as the case may be.14. Inview of this position, it seems somewhat difficult to accept the correctness of the conclusion reached by the High Court that the requirement about 75 per cent attendance must be taken collectively. It is clear that if the said requirement is read collectively, a student may be entitled to claim to have completed the regular course of study without attending any single practical or tutorial, as the case may be, if he has attended all the lectures in a given subject. Take, for instance, the case of English, History, or Political Science in the group for which the respondent was studying. It is not disputed by Mr. Basudev Prasad that in these subjects theoretically, it would be open to the student to attend the maximum number of lectures and not to do any tutorial at all. In other words, the construction placed by the High Court upon Regulation 4 leads to this unreasonable consequence that attendance at the lectures alone may, in a given case, entitled a student to appear for the examination, though he may have done no tutorial at all. In our opinion, this could not have been the intention of the regulation. It is true that the second clause of Regulation 4 requires that the percentage in question shall be calculated on the total number of lectures, tutorials and practicals delivered or provided during the session; but this provision is in the nature of a mere corollary to the main provision prescribed by Regulation 4, and, if the requirement as to 75 per cent attendance has been prescribed separately in relation to lectures, tutorials and/or practicals, the second clause in question must be read accordingly. Thus read, it only means that when the percentage is determined in reference to lectures, tutorials and practicals, what has to be taken into account is the total number of lectures delivered, or tutorials and practicals held during the session in question. We have carefully considered the reasons given by the High Court in support of its conclusion, but we are not satisfied that those reasons justify the construction which the High Court has placed on the material words used in Regulation 4.It appears that before the writ petition was filed by the respondent in the present case, his father Mr. C. K. Raman, I. C S., wrote a long letter on April 11, 1965 to appellant No. 1 inviting him to reconsider his decision in the case of his son and to allow his son to take the University examination in question. In this long communication which is argumentative, the respondents father has adopted to tone which indicates that he attempted to throw his weight about in persuading appellant No. 1 to cancel the impugned notice. Appellant No. 1 promptly replied to the said communication and informed the respondents father that he had referred the case of the respondent to the Vice-Chancellor with a statement of his attendance together with his letter for such action as he thought best under the circumstances. Appellant No. 1 added that the Vice-Chancellor had decided that it was not possible to accept the request made by the respondents father as the University regulations did not permit the same.It would be recalled that the impugned notice was published on March 29, 1965, and the letter written by the respondents father on the 11th April was replied by appellant No. 1 on the 12th April. Even so, the respondent did not file his writ petition until Sunday, the 18th April; and as we have already mentioned, the writ petition was presented at the bungalow of the Chief Justice and was heard for admission and interim orders on Sunday night. It is true that if justice demands that the Court should receive a petition even on Sunday, the Court should and ought to accept the petition; but having regard to the fact that the petitioner postponed the filling of the application until Sunday (18th April 1965) night, and other relevant circumstances to which we have already adverted, we think it would have been better if the High Court not passed an interim order on the said night as it has done. It is hardly necessary to emphasise that in dealing with matters relating to orders passed by authorities of educational institutions under Art. 226 of the Constitution, the High Court should normally be very slow to pass ex parte interim orders, because matters falling within the jurisdiction of the educational authorities should normally be left to their decision, and the High Court should interfere with them only when it thinks it must do so in the interests of justice.Even on the merits, we think we ought to point out that where the question involved is one of interpreting a regulation framed by the Academic Council of a University, the High Court should ordinarily be reluctant to issue a writ of certiorari where it is plain that the regulation in question is capable of two constructions, and it would generally not be expedient for the High Court to reverse a decision of the educational authorities on the ground that the construction placed by the said authorities on the relevant regulation appears to the High Court less reasonable than the alternative construction which it is pleased to accept. The limits of the High Courts jurisdiction to issue a writ of certiorari are well recognised and it is, on the whole, desirable that the requirements prescribed by judicial decisions in the exercise of writ jurisdiction in dealing with such matters should be carefully borne in mind.