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In Commissioner of Income-tax v. Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd. , our attention to the following passage has been drawn :

"By now, the parameters of the court's power of judicial review of administrative or executive action or decision and the grounds on which the court can interfere with the same are well-settled and it would be redundant to recapitulate the whole catena of decisions of this Court commencing from Barium Chemicals' case on the point. Indisputably, it is a settled position that if the action or decision is perverse or is such that no reasonable body of persons, properly informed, could come to, or has been arrived at by the authority misdirecting itself by adopting a wrong approach, or has been influenced by irrelevant or extraneous matters the court would be justified in interfering with the same. This Court in one of its later decisions in Smt. Shalini Soni v. Union of India , has observed thus : 'It is an unwritten rule of the law, constitutional and administrative, that whenever a decision-making function is entrusted to the subjective satisfaction of a statutory functionary, there is an implicit obligation to apply his mind to pertinent and proximate matters only, eschewing the irrelevant and the remote.' Suffice it to say that the following passage appearing at pages 285-86 in Prof. de Smith's treatise : Judicial Review of Administrative Action (4th Edition) succinctly summarises the several principles formulated by the court in that behalf thus :