It was agreed by Supreme Court vacation bench of Justices P Sathasivam and A.K. Patnaik to decide on Friday, 1st of July 2011, the criteria to admit OBC candidates to thousand of seats under 27% quota in Central Education Institutions, including Delhi university and Jawaharlal Nehru University.
The senior advocate Indu Malhotra argued by citing a constitution bench that, though it was to be 10% less than the last cut off mark for general category candidates, the JNU was admitting students who had scored 10% less than the eligibility criteria for our general category. The admission eligibility criteria for general category candidates is 50% of the total marks in most of the institutions and the OBC candidates who score more than 40% are considered for the admission.
It was disputed by Senior Advocate A. Mariarputham and counsel Sanjay Parikh that, this would mean no OBC candidate would get admission and seats lapse back to general category. The Central Education institutions were asked to enhance their seats to accommodate OBC candidates without deducting any seats for the general category candidates, under the 2006 Act.
By applying 10% less than the cut-off criteria, the additional seats created for the benefit of OBC candidates would be usurped by the general category and thereby the objective of social welfare legislation would be negated.
In 2009, constitution bench took effort to elucidate the puzzlement and it was said by them that, it should be fixed at 10% less than the cut-off approved for the general candidates. But it appears the confusion between the cut-off and eligibility criteria continues to exist.
The OBC candidates argued that in its prospectus the central educational institution was free from prescribing high eligibility criteria for the general category candidates and apply 10% less rule for backward class students. But by resorting to the last cut-off of the admitted general category candidates, the institutes cannot deny admission to the OBCs, which make most backward class students ineligible for higher studies.
Report by Sharika