Court upholds 10% quota for EWS in landmark 3-2 verdict

The Supreme Court on Monday affirmed the validity of the central law providing 10% reservation benefits to economically weaker sections (EWS), with the five-judge Constitution bench ruling 3-2 in favour of the 103rd Constitutional Amendment of 2019.

- Utkarsh Anand

NEW DELHI: Justices Dinesh Maheshwari, Bela M Trivedi and JB Pardiwala declared the law to be valid and not violating either the basic structure of the Constitution or the equality code. Chief Justice of India Uday Umesh Lalit and justice S Ravindra Bhat, comprising the minority on the bench, held the EWS quota law to be discriminatory and exclusionary. Justice Bhat authored the dissenting judgment for himself and the CJI.

While all the five judges on the bench agreed that economic criteria could be a sound legal basis for affirmative action by the State, the two dissenting judges could not concur with the majority view on excluding socially and educationally backward classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes from the benefit of the EWS quota law.

Significantly, the majority verdict also held that the 50% ceiling on reservation is "not inviolable or inflexible", marking a paradigm shift from the thumb rule that has governed reservations in India, preventing states from enforcing quotas that take the proportion above the 50% mark, as laid down by a nine-judge bench in the 1992 Indra Sawhney judgment. The majority view noted that the 50% ceiling applied only to the provisions of the Constitution which existed at that time and cannot extend to the 2019 amendment.

But the two judges in the minority refrained from commenting on the 50% cap and instead sounded a word of caution against any categorical finding on the Indra Sawhney judgment. They pointed out that not only could the observation by the majority view could seal the fate of the 69% Tamil Nadu quota law which is still pending before another bench of the top court, it may also lead to "further infractions" where reservation could be demanded as a right.