New Delhi, August 17
In a significant ruling on judicious implementation of reservation, the Supreme Court today held that there could not be a separate quota for women of reserved categories in government employment within the quota fixed for SCs, STs and OBCs under the law.
If a provision was made for some special seats for women from these reserved categories for appointment, then it has to with within the limit of the percentage of quota fixed for SCs (22 per cent), STs (7.5 per cent) and OBCs (27 per cent) as fixed under the law, the court held.
“Where a special reservation for women is provided within the social reservation for SCs, the proper procedure is first to fill up the quota for SCs in order of merit and then find out the number of candidates among them who belong to the special reservation group of SC-women,” a Bench comprising Chief Justice K. G. Balakrishnan and justices R. V. Raveendran and Dalveer Bhandari said.
Elaborating further, the court said if the number of women on such a list was equal to or more than the number of special reservation quota, “then there is no need for further selection towards the special reservation quota. Only if there is any shortfall, the requisite number of SC women shall have to be taken by deleting the corresponding number of candidates from the bottom of the list relating to SCs.”
Thus women selected on merit within the vertical reservation quota would be counted against the horizontal reservation for women, the court held.
To make it more clear, the court gave an illustration for the Public Service Commissions to understand the provision of implementation where special seats were kept aside within the reserved categories for the women. If there were 200 vacancies and 15 per cent is the vertical reservation for SCs, they will get a total of 30 seats. If special provision of 9 posts were made for women from SCs, the proper description to clarify it by the appointing authorities would be “For SC: 30 posts of which 9 are for women”.
“Obviously, there is, and there can be, no reservation category of male or men or female or women,” the court said.
The ruling came in a case challenging the appointment of more women judicial officers from SC, ST and OBC category than the prescribed quota by Rajasthan Public Service Commission in 2001 when it made a total selection of 97 judges for lower courts.
The effect of the wrong implementation of reservation formula was that at least three candidates, two from OBC and one from general category who were higher on the merit list, were deprived of the appointment as their seats were encroached upon by the women judicial officers appointed from reserved quota.
