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Kerala Governor Arif Mohammed Khan appointed Dr KK Saju, Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT), as the Vice-Chancellor in-charge of Kannur University on Friday.
According to a Raj Bhavan notification, Prof. Saju will assume the powers and duties of the Vice-Chancellor starting Saturday, in addition to his current responsibilities, until further notice. He replaces S. Bijoy Nandan, who retired from service on Friday. Kannur University has been without a regular Vice-Chancellor since the Supreme Court quashed the reappointment of Gopinath Ravindran on November 30 last year. A bench of Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud also comprising Justice JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra set aside the Kerala High Court order and quashed the notification re-appointing Gopinath Ravindran as the Vice-Chancellor of Kannur University. "We have reached to the conclusion that although the notification reappointing respondent No. 4 (Gopinath Ravindran) to the post of Vice-Chancellor was issued by the Chancellor yet the decision stood vitiated by the influence of extraneous considerations or to put it in other words by the unwarranted intervention of the State Government," the court said. The "suitability" of a candidate for appointment to a post is to be judged by the appointing authority and not by the court unless the appointment is contrary to the statutory rules/provisions, the court said. The court said it is the Chancellor who has been conferred with the competence under the Act 1996 to appoint or reappoint a Vice-Chancellor. No other person even the Pro-Chancellor or any superior authority can interfere with the functioning of the statutory authority and if any decision is taken by a statutory authority at the behest or on a suggestion of a person who has no statutory role to play, the same would be patently illegal, the court said. (ANI)
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