Senior Advocate R Venkataramani was on Wednesday, 28 September, appointed as the next Attorney General (AG) of India for a period of three years, the Ministry of Law and Justice said in a statement.
Venkataramani will succeed the incumbent Attorney General KK Venugopal whose tenure will end on 30 September.
Born on 13 April 1950 in Pondicherry, Venkataramani enrolled as a lawyer with the Bar Council of Tamil Nadu in July 1977.
In 1979, he shifted his practice to the supreme court and was designated senior advocate by the apex court in 1997.
Venkataramani has served as a member of the Law Commission of India in 2010 and in 2013.
He has represented the Centre, several state governments, public sector undertakings, and universities before the supreme court and high courts on many counts.
It was earlier reported that senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi would take over Venugopal as the new AG. However, Rohatgi withdrew his consent for the appointment.
In the recently concluded Supreme Court hearing against the Karnataka High Court ruling to ban the wearing of hijab by Muslim girls in educational institutions, Venkataramani had appeared for the teachers of the Udupi college.
In the court, he had submitted that the schools must be free from all religious elements to ensure the transmission of knowledge between the teacher and the student, without any separation or walls, LiveLaw had reported.
On being asked by Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia if wearing a hijab would create a wall of separation, Venkataramani had said that any religious symbol would.
"School must be free from all these elements without the slightest distractions."R Venkataramani
Venkataramani was also appointed as the court receiver to look into the issues of the homebuyers in the Amrapali Group Case.
In a recent hearing in the top court, he had assured a bench of Chief Justice UU Lalit and Justice Bela M Trivedi that all the flats will be handed over only after the realisation of the full payment from the homebuyers, The Economic Times had reported.
(With inputs from Bar & Bench, The Economic Times, and LiveLaw.)
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