Supreme Court to announce its verdict on pleas against 10% EWS quota tomorrow

NEW DELHI: A Constitution bench in the Supreme Court will deliver its verdict on Monday on the validity of the central law for 10% reservation benefits to economically weaker sections (EWS).

The five-judge bench is headed by Chief Justice of India Uday Umesh Lalit and comprises justices Dinesh Maheshwari, S Ravindra Bhat, Bela M Trivedi and JB Pardiwala. According to the information available on the court website, justices Lalit and Bhat will be pronouncing their separate judgments. The judgment will come a day before CJI Lalit retires on November 8.

The constitution bench is set to rule on a bunch of legal issues surrounding the validity of the 103rd Constitution Amendment providing for 10% reservation for EWS. By the 103rd Amendment Act, Articles 15(6) and 16(6) were introduced in the Constitution, providing 10% reservation in jobs and admissions to EWS, who were to be persons other than SC, ST and OBC and whose annual family income was below ₹8 lakh.

The legal issues included whether the 103rd Constitution Amendment can be said to breach the basic structure of the Constitution by permitting the State to make special provisions, including reservation, based on economic criteria, or by permitting the state to make special provisions in relation to admission to private unaided institutions.

“Whether the 103rd Constitution Amendment can be said to breach the basic structure of the

Constitution in excluding the SEBCs/OBCs’/SC/STs from the scope of EWS reservation,” stated another issue framed by the bench.

The court will also rule on a contention that the 103rd Constitution Amendment breaches the 50% ceiling on reservation fixed in the 1992 Indra Sawhney (famously known as Mandal

Commission) case. The ninejudge bench in the Indra Sawhney case had ruled that “reservation should not exceed 50%, barring certain extraordinary situations.”

Therefore, the court verdict could change the paradigm that has governed reservations in India, preventing states from enforcing quotas that take the proportion above the 50% mark laid down in 1992 by the apex court. Besides, it will also take a call on economic criteria being the chief yardstick to provide reservation to those belonging to upper castes while keeping the conventionally defined backward classes such as SC, ST and OBC out of the scope of the quota benefits under this law.

The court had on September 27 reserved its verdict on a clutch of petitions that have questioned the constitutional validity of EWS quota on the grounds that not only does the 103rd constitutional breach the 50% ceiling under the 1992 judgment, the amendment is also unconstitutional for considering economic status as the sole criterion for identifying backwardness.

The petitioners, comprising individuals and organisations, have opposed reservation for EWS also on the ground that any affirmative action is meant for backward classes and that the law is also bad for excluding those among SC, ST, and OBC from its purview. On the other hand, the central government, led by then attorney general KK Venugopal and solicitor general Tushar Mehta defended the 10% reservation, claiming that it was a shift from caste-based reservation.

SC verdict could change the paradigm that has governed reservations in India.