Remove caste as criteria to identify OBCs: Plea

Should a person belonging to the Other Backward Class (OBC) be necessarily identified by his/her caste?

Posing this question to the Supreme Court, a petition filed by a Kerala-based organisation Nair Service Society (NSS) came up for hearing before a bench of the Supreme Court that refused to issue notice, but kept the matter alive by opening a window for the society to approach the High Court,

In India, OBCs are still identified based on caste and not based on their social and economic backwardness. Finding fault with such a classification, the petition of NSS told a bench of Justices Arun Mishra and Vineet Saran to consider removing caste as a criteria to identify OBCs.

The petitioner represented by senior advocate R Venkataramani suggested that the concept of creamy layer has failed to achieve its desired result. As a result of keeping caste as the benchmark of identifying socially and economically deprived classes of society meriting reservation, a certain caste or community keeps progressing at the cost of other backward class of community. At present, OBCs get up to 27 per cent reservation in education and services of the Government.

By a decision of July 11, 2008, the Supreme Court allowed OBC reservation in central educational institutions but with a rider to exclude creamy layer. Within three months, the Centre came out with a notification increasing the income limit for exclusion of creamy layer class by raising the annual income ceiling from Rs 2.5 lakh to Rs 4.5 lakh.