Supreme Court - Vacant OBC Quota Seats to Go to General Category

The Supreme Court on Monday said that the seats remaining vacant after the implementation of 27% OBC quota in central educational institutions, including IITs and IIMs, will go to the general category candidates.

The Supreme Court issued notice to the Centre on a petition from P.V. Indiresan, former Director of Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, for a direction that the 432 vacant seats in SC/ST/OBC categories in the IITs be filled by general category candidates.

A five-judge Constitution Bench consisting of Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, Justices Arijit Pasayat, C.K. Thakker, R.V. Raveendran and Dalveer Bhandari issued the notice after hearing senior counsel K.K. Venugopal for the petitioner and Solicitor-General G.E. Vahanvati for the Centre.

Mr. Venugopal submitted that as per the April 10 judgment, vacancies in the reserved seats would go to the general category.

He said the court should clarify whether such seats could go to the general category. There were 432 vacant seats which had not been filled and this had created confusion. If these seats remained vacant the infrastructure created in the institutions would go waste, he said. As per the judgment, the vacancies could not go waste.

Mr. Justice Pasayat intervened and told counsel, “What is the confusion? The judgments [of Mr. Justice Pasayat and Mr. Justice Thakker and Mr. Justice Bhandari] have clearly stated that the vacant seats will go to the general category. This is very clear as the intention was the seats should not remain vacant.”

Mr. Justice Bhandari also said that there was no confusion in the judgment.

Mr. Vahanvati said he would take instructions and file the Centre’s response in two weeks.

In his application Mr. Indiresan said that despite the judgment, it was clear that the IITs, Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University and the HRD Ministry were of the view that the vacant seats in the reserved quota would not revert automatically to be filled by students from the general category and that it would not be possible to further lower the cut-off mark to accommodate more OBC candidates.

The petitioner pointed out that according to the judgment cut-off marks to the extent of 10 per cent could be reduced for reserved candidates but the Central educational institutions had not acted on it.

He sought a clarification that the reserved seats be filled from the general category candidates and a direction to implement the direction on cut-off marks for admission of students in the reserved category.

The Bench posted the matter for further hearing on September 29.