Admission Criteria for OBC students in Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University
The Supreme Court on Thursday, 21st July 2011, said the principle
behind quota for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes was very different from the
one under which the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) were given 27% reservation in
educational institutions.
Hearing elaborate arguments on what should be the admission criteria for OBC students
in Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, a bench of Justices R V Raveendran
and A K Patnaik said SCs/STs were granted reservation because of being oppressed
for centuries, but the same was not true for OBCs.
Reservation for OBCs was judicially upheld after taking out the creamy layer from
the purview of the social affirmative action. But there is no creamy layer exclusion
for SCs and STs, the bench said. Because of this, it needed examination whether
OBC students who figured in the merit list along with general category students
to secure a seat should be counted within the 27% quota allotted for OBCs in central
educational institutions, the bench said.
Senior advocate K K Venugopal and counsel Gopal Shankarnarayan, who argued for petitioner
and former IIT director P V Indiresan, said the admission criteria must be based
on 10% relaxation from the cut-off marks for the last general category candidate
admitted by the institution.
They said the constitution bench, while upholding 27% reservation for
OBCs, had intended it to be 10% below the eligibility criteria for general category
students. Otherwise, the 27% quota for OBCs would be frustrated and the extra seats
created to accommodate the students from backward class would lapse to the general
category, they said.
Courtesy: Times of India
