Reservation not at odds with merit’: Supreme Court upholds 27% OBC quota

CategorySocial

Last Updated22/01/2022

The Supreme Court stated by Underlining that reservation is not at odds with merit but furthers its distributive consequences.
This was stated by the bench of Justices in a detailed order providing reasons for its ruling which upheld the Constitutional validity of reservation for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in the All India Quota for National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for undergraduate and postgraduate medical admissions.

The Supreme Court said that merit cannot be reduced to narrow definitions of performance in an open competitive examination and high scores in an examination are not a proxy for merit.
It said merit should be socially contextualised and reconceptualized as an instrument that advances social goods like equality that we as a society value.

On October 21, the Supreme Court had observed the income limit in the criteria for the determination of the creamy layer of the OBC category and the EWS category is the same, namely, Rs 8 lakhs.
While the creamy layer in the OBC category is identified for excluding a section of the community that has economically progressed to such an extent that the social backwardness of the community diminishes.
The EWS category is identified to include the segment which is ‘poorer’ when compared to the rest of the community…
In these circumstances the question arises about the arbitrariness to provide the same income limit both for the OBC and EWS categories.”

Reservation is a form of positive discrimination, created to promote equality among marginalised sections, so as to protect them from social and historical injustice.
Generally, it means giving preferential treatment to marginalised sections of society in employment and access to education.
It was also originally developed to correct years of discrimination and to give a boost to disadvantaged groups.
In India, people have been historically discriminated on the basis of caste.

The Supreme Court had consistently held that the constitutional guarantee of equality before the law referred to “formal equality” - of simply ensuring that on its face, the law did not discriminate between sections of people.
Article 16(4) of the Constitution - which allowed the State to make reservations in public employment - was considered to be an “exception” to the general “rule” of formal equality. Thus, it was interpreted narrowly.

Substantive equality is referred to as equity in the sense that equality also involves recognizing differences when they are becoming disadvantages.
Substantive equality looks at the roots of inequality and identifies them, even if this involves removing the barriers that disadvantage individuals.
There is no guarantee of the outcome that may be produced, but individuals do have the equality of opportunity.

Cultural capital is a form of power beyond the economic form, and is exercised through different non-economic goods and services such as information, articulation, education, and aesthetics.
It helps to understand the existence of power and domination within society, through cultural stratification, and to argue that success can be better explained by the inheritance of cultural capital from the family, rather than through individual talent.

Article 15(4) and 16(4) of the Constitution enabled the State and Central Governments to reserve seats in government services for the members of the SC and ST.
The Constitution was amended by the Constitution (77th Amendment) Act, 1995 and a new clause (4A) was inserted in Article 16 to enable the government to provide reservation in promotion.
Constitutional 81st Amendment Act, 2000 inserted Article 16 (4 B) which enables the state to fill the unfilled vacancies of a year which are reserved for SCs/STs in the succeeding year, thereby nullifying the ceiling of fifty percent reservation on total number of vacancies of that year.

The reservation ensures opportunities are distributed in such a way that backward classes are equally able to benefit from such opportunities which typically evade them because of structural barriers.
This is the only manner in which merit can be a democratising force that equalises inherited disadvantages and privileges.
Otherwise, claims of individual merit are nothing but tools of obscuring inheritances that underlie achievements.
How we assess merit should also encapsulate if it mitigates or entrenches inequalities. `