Caste and class: On OBC reservation

If public resources are to dismantle both caste hierarchy and class inequality, OBC reservation should resist the notion that caste disadvantage makes economic differences among OBC families irrelevant. The ‘creamy layer’ rules are responsible for identifying those OBC members who have advanced sufficiently to no longer require affirmative action. However, the government has implemented them inconsistently. The Supreme Court in March corrected one inconsistency, that the government cannot hold the salary alone of an OBC candidate’s parent as evidence of social advancement. In Indra Sawhney (1992), the Court upheld the government’s 27% reservation for OBC candidates in central government services if it also excluded economically advanced sections, i.e., the creamy layer, among OBCs. Following the equivalence requirement issued in 1993, the Department of Personnel & Training (DoPT) issued a “clarification” in 2004 that the government used, from around 2015, to deny dozens of OBC candidates who had cleared the Civil Services Examination their benefits because their parents’ salaries exceeded the official threshold due to pay revisions that did not always reflect changes in occupational status. The Cabinet also approved equivalence guidelines in 2017 but a parliamentary committee criticised it over a number of issues.

In Rohith Nathan (2026), the Court rightly rejected the government’s use of the 2004 “clarification” to arbitrarily exclude OBC candidates based on their parents’ salaries alone. However, the government stalled service allocations following the 2025 examination and appealed that retrospectively applying the ruling would create administrative chaos. On November 6, the Court conceded that it had not asked the government to reopen completed selections, as it could set workers against one another while leaving government misapplication unaddressed. A proactive policy is essential now as the government must create supernumerary posts for legitimate claimants and apply the 1993 rules to pending allocations without vouchsafing these remedies for only those who can afford litigation. Access to public employment continues to be grossly unequal: per the 2024-25 DoPT Annual Report, OBC representation in central government employment was 26.3% but declined steadily towards higher positions. As the Justice G. Rohini Commission also indicated, the benefits of reservation are distributed unevenly among OBC communities. However, the report, submitted in 2023, is still not in the public domain. The coming Census includes caste enumeration but policymakers also need data on each caste’s education, occupations, assets, and landholdings. Defending redistribution among caste groups while ignoring major inequalities within them, and constraining OBC reservation assuming relatively more high-income families capture the benefits without first establishing the extent and the causes are equally difficult to justify.