General Category students can't take over Merit List OBC seats: SC

On Thursday, Supreme Court made clear that cutoff marks means the minimum marks or the minimum eligibility to apply for a certain program, and it should be notified to candidates in advance. Supreme Court also said that Merit list OBC seats are reserved and can't be allotted to General category (GC). It has made clear that these OBC seats can't be converted into GC if OBC aspirants are available on the merit list. OBC case was more precisely interpreted by the Bench of Justices that as per a provision came on 14th October, 2008, emphasized that where the minimum eligibility marks to qualify the exams for GC is 50% then the minimum eligibility marks for the OBC should not be less than 45%.

P.V.Indiresan, the appellant, wanted Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) to follow the same procedure for the session of 2008-29 and 2009-10, under which the minimum eligibility marks will be fixed for the GC, and for OBC, the marks would be decided after all the GC seats were filled by fixing the 10% below the marks of the last GC candidate admitted. Bench rejected this procedure and perpetuated the Delhi High Court decision, as this procedure is discriminatory and apart from being unknown in regard to admissions to educational institutions. It has also made clear that the minimum eligibility marks are always predefined before the admission process takes place for the academic year.

Predefined minimum eligibility marks are standardized for all the aspirants and the prospective aspirant should know whether he/she is eligible to apply or not. Justice Raveendran made clear in his judgment that the eligibility criteria had to be rewritten after the cutoff procedure followed by the JNU in those days, because the applications were received from the eligible candidates only. It cannot turn down an aspirant who has fulfilled the eligibility criteria and whose rank is in the merit list as he/she is within the number of seats available for admission by saying that you should have secured some more marks, as compared to the marks secured by the other category aspirant. In simpler terms, it cannot disentitle an aspirant who is actually entitled to admission on the basis of a provision which was neither known nor determined at the time of declaration of admissions.

Bench has figured out that the procedure implemented by the University has led to the conversion of OBC seats into GC. It has made clear that if there are 154 seats in total and 42 seats are allotted to OBC aspirants, then all the seats should be filled by the OBC aspirants as per the merit list of OBC aspirants and on the basis of minimum eligibility marks at the time of admission. When an OBC candidate is available, fulfilling all the eligibility conditions, then conversion of OBC seat into GC is not acceptable. As far as the admissions of 2011-12 are concerned, if any central educational institution has already determined cut-off marks for the OBCs with reference to the marks obtained by the last candidate in the GC and has allotted the unfilled OBC seat to the GC aspirant, such admission shall not be terminated.

The last date of admission has been extended to 31st August, 2011 as a special case to facilitate filling of vacant OBC seats. However, it has made clear by the bench that if the OBC seats lying vacant in any central educational institution, then it should be filled up by the OBC students only. It can only be converted into the GC if the OBC aspirants are not fulfilling the desired eligibility criteria.

 

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Source: Richha Bhatnagar (Shiksha Team)
Date: 20th August, 2011