NOC from competitors? No need, HC tells NGU

NOC from competitors? No need, HC tells NGU

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Ahmedabad:11.02.2021 

The Gujarat high court said that there cannot be the pre-condition of obtaining an NOC from a competitor college within a 25-km radius to start an educational institution in the same discipline.

With this observation, the bench of Justice Vineet Kothari and Justice Gita Gopi said that the provision of Hemchandracharya North Gujarat University can be dispensed with by which it grants affiliation to an education institute only after it obtains an NOC from another institute imparting education in the same discipline within a 25-km radius.

The issue involved Swamy Vivekanand Education Trust, which wanted to start a college in Kadi in 2013 and requested the university for affiliation. The university received an opinion from its local inspection committee and granted affiliation to the trust. But another institute being run by MP Shah Education Society objected and moved the HC claiming that its NOC was not obtained. A single-judge bench held that the new college should have obtained an NOC from the nearby existing institute.

The issue reached to the division bench, which expressed its “dismay” at the existence of such a system in NGU. The judges observed, “On an overview of the situation also and with the rapid increase in the population and number of students increasing ever, we cannot even appreciate the restrictions put about the existence of more than one or more educational institutions to provide such education and these variety of factors which may be relevant to determine the need for setting up of more of such educational institutions, which is ever changing and therefore, no static criteria or yardsticks can be fixed even by the competent bodies under the Act of 1986.”

For affiliation, a new college needed an NOC from another college of same discipline if it was within a 25-km radius