August 1 : The Supreme Court issued seven-judge Constitution Bench led by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud ruled the judgement.
According to Supreme court “State Government has power to categorise scheduled castes and scheduled tribes ” for the grant of reservation in admissions and public jobs.
Hence Four of the seven judges on the Bench individually stated that the government should apply the “creamy layer principle” to SC and ST, as it has done for OBCs.
And It was important to exclude wealthy members from the benefits of reserve in order to make way for the truly struggling within these groups.
Particularly “The state must develop a policy for identifying the creamy layer, even among SC and ST, in order to remove them from the benefits of affirmative action.
According to justice B.R.Gavai ” In my opinion, only this can attain true equality as guaranteed in the Constitution.
While a child of a civil service officer be compared to a child of a SC member attending a gram panchayat school in a village?” Justice B.R. Gavai questioned.
And Three other judges on the Bench, Justices Vikram Nath, Pankaj Mithal, and Satish Chandra Sharma, agreed with this view.
The decision came after the seven-judge bench was asked in 2020 to look at the constitutionality of the Tamil Nadu Arunthathiyars Reservation Act, 2009.
And the Punjab Scheduled Castes and Backward Classes (Reservation in Services) Act, 2006.
Previously,Chief Justice Chandrachud pointed to the Indra Sawhney case,nine-judge bench ruled that classifying the backward class into ‘backward’ and’more backward’ persons was constitutional.
The same logic would apply to Scheduled Castes.
