Supreme Court reserves order on Centre request to delay OBC creamy layer ruling

The Supreme Court on Thursday reserved its order on the Centre's plea seeking a two-year delay in applying its March 11 judgment on Other Backward Classes creamy layer rules. The Centre asked the court to apply the judgment prospectively, warning that enforcing it for past appointments and admissions would create administrative chaos. A bench of justices PS Narasimha and R Mahadevan questioned the Centre about why it filed the modification request in late August, despite the original judgment giving six months for implementation. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta and Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati represented the Centre. They stated that the application does not challenge the judgment itself, but only seeks time to adjust competing rights and carry out an effective equivalence exercise. The Centre argued that applying the ruling to past and ongoing recruitments would reopen seniority and cadre allocations for candidates who were not even parties to the litigation. Bhati noted that Civil Service Examination recruitment rules for this year and last year are already out, and some candidates are using the March ruling to seek better allocations. She added that under this judgment, candidates whose parents earn over ₹1 crore annually could qualify as OBC non-creamy layer. The original March judgment came from appeals filed by the Centre against Madras High Court orders. The High Court had allowed two candidates to be treated as non-creamy layer despite high parental income from multinational and PSU employment, ruling that creamy layer status should depend on equivalent posts rather than salary alone. The top court upheld this view, stating that excluding children of PSU or private employees based only on salary income leads to hostile discrimination. The creamy layer rule originated from a 1993 notification following the 1992 Indra Sawhney judgment, which set 27 percent reservation for OBCs while excluding the creamy layer. The Centre issued a clarificatory order in 2004 regarding salary and other income assessments. The March ruling emphasized that salary income cannot be mechanically aggregated in a way that defeats constitutional objectives. Senior advocates Basav Prabhu Patil, Sanjay Hedge, P Wilson, and advocate Prateek Chadha opposed the Centre's application on behalf of beneficiaries, arguing it was a review petition and should not be entertained. Earlier this month, the court had declined to stay its judgment while issuing notice on the Centre's plea.